


iconoclasm

by aerynlallaboso



Series: apocrypha [1]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, M/M, Medium Chaos (Dishonored), canon-typical Blood and Heresy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-10-10
Packaged: 2018-07-29 11:42:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 53,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7683157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerynlallaboso/pseuds/aerynlallaboso
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The end is near,</i> the Heart whispers to him as he is about to drift off to sleep. <i>Be careful, Corvo.</i></p><p>(The Eighth year of the reign of Empress Emily Kaldwin, First of her Name, the second year without a whisper from the Outsider, is the year the Void chooses to mark the end of an era.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> dishonored made me gay
> 
> ch 2 of this is all ready to go because i have no confidence in my own ability to write long fics, but i'm going to try and update weekly or fortnightly so i have plenty of time to get ahead on it >:) also the amount of chapters is a rough estimate and may increase or decrease. enjoy

_The end is near_ , the Heart whispers to him as he is about to drift off to sleep.

 

Corvo rolls over and hooks one leg around the ends of his blankets, shivering when the cool night air hits his bare skin. “The end of what?” he murmurs sleepily.

 

The Heart does not answer. It does this a lot lately, whispering secrets - tiny, irrelevant, Emily’s newfound taste for Tyvian-stewed eels or the presence of a stray seagull on the tower grounds - just before he starts to dream. It costs him sleep every time it speaks like this, not least because it sounds so like Jessamine mouthing sweet nothings in his ear. Only Jessamine never whispered so cryptically, and she never spoke of death.

 

He sighs. The Heart lies in a box of ebony and driftwood a few feet from his bed, and he feels obligated to open it now, to see if it’s going to talk again.

 

 _The end is near_. It does, as he lifts it out and cradles it in his palms. The machinery inside it ticks softly in the dark. Corvo is struck, as always, by the cruelty of fate that has led to its current state. He once had Jessamine’s heart, figuratively, and now he has her Heart, literally, a supernatural taxidermy locked in a chest.

 

He tries not to think about it. “The end of what?” he asks again. The Heart beats a steady tattoo in his hands. Its flesh is dry and impossibly warm.

 

A gentle sigh escapes the Heart. _Be careful, Corvo_ , it breathes.

 

Corvo’s spine tingles; his left hand itches. Cold air sweeps through the cracks in his curtains and ruffles his hair, chills his toes flush against the panelled wooden floor. His thighs sting from holding his low crouch, but he makes no move to get up.

 

The Heart says nothing more that night. Corvo gets no sleep regardless.

 

~

 

The sun rises later than yesterday, as it is wont to do in the season leading up to the Month of Darkness, and Corvo rises with it. He dresses, ensures he doesn’t look as if he spent the night contemplating his own death and that of everyone he loves, and winds his way down to the Empress’s private dining hall, where the jewel of the Isles sits eating over-sugared porridge and peering intently at a book on sword stances. One from his own small collection, no less, which he doesn’t remember lending to her. Her lessons are going well.

 

“The cook left you a tartlet from last night,” Emily says without glancing up. “I think he likes you, if you want my opinion. So many people do at the moment.”

 

“I thought you liked planning your party.” A servant draws out a chair for him across from Emily. He sits, waves the man away with a small gesture of gratitude.

 

“I do, but - there’s so _many_ things to decide on. Menus, guest lists, clothing, lightning, tablecloth colours, and that’s just the first of the parties. I wish I could just have dinner with you and maybe Callista.” Emily looks at him properly and gives him a smile, sweet and bright and so like her mother that he feels a small pang of heartache.

 

The memory of the Heart’s warning comes back to him. Replayed in daylight, it sounds far more ominous, and he resolves to send out feelers among his contacts later. Something so vague is unlikely to turn up much information, of course. The best thing would be to talk to the Heart again, or its creator, but that isn’t an option right now.

 

“You understand, right Corvo? You’re a man of few words, too.” Emily has closed her book and finished her meal and is teasing him. “I heard my maid say it makes you more alluring. Tall, dark and mysterious.”

 

“I’m much too old for her,” he says. None of Emily’s matched set of maids can be older than thirty, and Corvo is rapidly approaching fifty. The fact that he has the physicality of a man half his age is not something people would be attracted by if they knew how he came by it - his Mark warms as if on cue - but they don’t, and so suitors cluster to Corvo like blowflies to a corpse when he is forced to be seen socially.

 

Emily laughs, and then she says, “Corvo,” in an entirely different tone. “There’s something I want to discuss with you.” She pauses, glances at the three servants standing to attention about the hall. “Privately.”

 

Her voice reverberates quite loudly in the high-ceilinged room, and the servants quietly take their leave. _The end is near._ What could she possibly want to speak to him about that couldn’t wait until later? And dismissing her staff like that - inviting speculation. Corvo crosses his hands, covering his left automatically. He directs a questioning look at Emily.

 

“I want to publicly introduce my father at court,” she says, and he stiffens. _This_. “It’s _time_ , Corvo. I’ll have my full majority in three weeks according to law, and you won’t have any claim to the throne whatsoever. Nobody can protest.”

 

“They will.”

 

“It doesn’t matter.” Her eyes burn like a match has been struck in them. “You’re my father and I want people to know. I want - to be a family. Again.”

 

“Emily-”

 

“ _Father_.”

 

They lock gazes: Emily, clothed in black and purple and the knowledge that she will be eighteen in less than a month; Corvo, wearing half a dozen knives on his person under an asymmetrical tunic and the tired look of a man who knows he isn’t going to be able to fight this battle much longer. He doesn’t really want to, either.

 

Jessamine would’ve wanted them to know. He thinks. It hurts that he isn’t sure about that anymore. “I’ll consider it.”

 

His daughter’s chair clatters backwards as she jumps forward - onto the table - and sweeps him into a triumphant hug, startling a small laugh from him. “I would like a decision by my birthday,” says Emily, who is near-on five foot ten and will probably cause the delicate oak dining table imported from somewhere not Gristol to collapse if she jumps on it again, so Corvo picks her up and removes her to the floor.

 

There is a tapping at the door of the hall, probably a servant or a guard checking on the commotion Emily just made. “I should head back upstairs,” he tells her, then adds, “I’d like that book back when you’re finished with it. Good job.”

 

~

 

There are thirteen letters waiting for him in his chambers this morning. Of these, two he discards immediately upon determining they are from overly solicitous women asking permission to meet with him, one from an equally solicitous man asking the same, seven from contacts with information, two from officials in the other Isles, and one from Cecelia. He opens the last with his smallest knife and smiles all the way through, especially the part where she describes sneaking into a corrupt noble’s house and pegging him to his washing line with a pair of dirty underwear. She really does take to the life of a spy. Or muckraker, as the case may be.

 

The other letters he takes his time reading, keeping a watchful eye on Emily downstairs all the while. His Mark flares only rarely while seeing through walls and thus he’s grown accustomed to using the vision whenever he can, making sure all the guards are on duty and there are no unexpected visitors in the tower. The next month will be a dangerous time for her.

 

Emily’s glowing yellow form flutters at the corner of his vision, heading towards the practice yards. Corvo slides one of the official letters from its envelope. To his surprise, where he expects fine watermarked paper with a crest on top, he finds a sheet of cheap rag with a few words scrawled. _Have you spoken to him lately?_

 

Corvo sits back in his chair. Who is ‘him’, he wants to ask the letter’s sender. _The end is near_. The end of what? Why is he being flooded with cryptic messages all of a sudden? How did the person who sent him this letter get it past the royal household’s checks?

 

_Have you spoken to him lately?_

 

“No, I haven’t,” Corvo says aloud.

 

The letter, held in his bare right hand, sparks alight. He drops it instantly and realises his mistake when the inkwell on his desk becomes a small dark pillar of flame, lancing out through a spill towards the floor. Corvo shouts - his Mark pulses, and without his consent, a thick gust of wind roars from his forearm. The fire stutters and dies against its force in a matter of seconds.

 

He stares.

 

“Lord Protector!” A guard is at the door, but has not opened it. Corvo gave instructions not to be disturbed unless he invited it. “Is everything alright? I heard yelling.”

 

“Everything’s fine,” Corvo says. It isn’t, because a nonsensical letter from an unknown source just nearly killed him - there’s a whale oil lamp in his dresser, void knows what would’ve happened if the fire had reached it - and he just used windblast without thinking about it, without _wanting_ to, and it was far stronger than anything he’s managed before.

 

Golden silhouettes flicker in and out of his peripheral vision. Emily is trying her hand at the crossbow today. Her aim has been improving.

 

“On second thought,” he calls to the guard. “Send me the man who checks the tower’s mail.”

 

~

 

By midday, the burnt ink and ashes have been scrubbed from Corvo’s desk - he did it himself, not wanting to alert the maids to his little ‘accident’ - and the mail-man has been questioned at length. He is a small man with a sharp nose and bulbous, staring eyes who is utterly terrified of Corvo, which he finally confessed as the reason he had not read the letter which proclaimed itself sent by Eustace Chareton. He is also now out of a job.

 

The envelope the letter came in survived the fire intact, and Corvo subjects it to a thorough investigation, foregoing lunch. Chareton is obviously not the sender. She is not a trustworthy woman, but one reliable enough in managing Morley’s major trade post that Corvo has never seen fit to interfere in her shadier activities. She would have no reason to send him a riddle which burst into flames as soon as he answered it.

 

He doesn’t know _why_ he answered it. He just had the feeling, out of nowhere, that the letter must have been referring to - him. _Him_. The person - if such a word can be used - responsible for the Mark on the back of his hand. _Have you spoken to him lately?_

 

Corvo has not seen the Outsider for more than two years. The last time, he said not a word, simply hovered with his arms crossed and his mouth half-open, as if about to launch into a monologue that would confound and irritate and intrigue Corvo in equal measure. But he didn’t. He vanished, and hasn’t shown himself since. His visits had been growing scarce even before then, as if his unnatural interest in him was waning.

 

Sometimes Corvo thinks he went mad when Jessamine died; he imagines that he carved the Mark into himself and stained the scars with river mud, killed Jessamine’s murderers with nothing but his bare hands and a sharp, sharp knife. The Outsider is someone he once saw in a crowd, embellished with the trappings of a god. The rats are called by corpses, not some dark magic he was gifted in a dream.

 

He doesn’t go down that path very far, because there is always the possibility at the end of it that the last eight years have been a fever dream before his execution, and tomorrow he will wake with his head on the block and his lover’s killers pulling Emily’s strings.

 

Nothing more can be gleaned from the mysterious letter, so Corvo sets is aside. He has his suspicions about who might have sent it. Nothing that can be confirmed without pursuing avenues he does not want to go down - Karnaca, for example. Daud, for example. The thought darkens his mood almost immediately.

 

A noise catches his attention. It’s a quiet scraping, the sound of a door opening or closing close by. He turns his head, hand on a knife, to see his locked bedchamber door slowly creeping open. Fingers curl around its edge; one wears a familiar ring.

 

“How in the void did you get in here?” Corvo says.

 

A giggle. “You left your window open,” Emily replies. She stands to her full height and rounds the door, shutting it behind her. “You’ll catch flu if you keep doing that, you know. Maybe I should pass a law requiring all citizens to keep their windows and outside doors closed during the cold months.”

 

“You shouldn’t be clambering around the tower’s ledges. What if you fell off? Dunwall shouldn’t lose its second Empress in a decade to a sudden slip on wet stone, Emily.”

 

“You’d catch me.”

 

She’s quite serious, and he has to admit, probably correct. He’s always been close enough; always been fast enough. He makes it his business to be. “That doesn’t mean you should intentionally take risks. I won’t always be here, and the amount of assassination attempts I have to stop cold will only increase once you turn eighteen.”

 

“I’m well aware.” Her face falls, turns tired and cold. Corvo feels bad for lecturing her. Emily has not been a child in years, and it suddenly occurs to him that her recent playfulness is her last attempt to act like one, before the law recognises her full adulthood. He wishes she hadn’t had to grow up so fast. “Corvo - why does it smell like smoke in here?”

 

“It’s a long story. Well, actually a rather short one.” His stomach is finally registering the fact that he skipped lunch. “Why don’t we go downstairs and get something to eat?”

 

Emily accepts his proffered arm, and Corvo remembers when she was small and complained of a black-eyed ghost wandering the tower opposite the Hound Pits Pub. This cannot possibly be a dream, he thinks. None of it can.

 

~

 

That evening, he dreams of the Void.

 

It is a true dream, not where sleep is simply a conduit to that other place. This Void is empty, devoid of the feeling that makes Corvo’s blood hum in his veins and his nerves sing with an electric, primal fear. The Outsider does not dwell here.

 

His subconscious conjures him up anyway. A black figure against brilliant, robin’s egg blue, framed by twisting cobblestones and the fractured landscape of the Flooded District. Corvo hasn’t been back there since Daud threw his sword into a den of weepers, though he hears the reclamation efforts are progressing well. It took five years to drain the water low enough that all the bodies could be recovered and burnt.

 

The false Outsider hangs lazily, effortlessly in the air. “The end is near,” he says with the Heart’s voice.

 

Corvo sighs. “The end of what?” he repeats. “The end of the world? The end of Emily’s reign? The end of my life? What are you talking about?”

 

A piece of paper drifts past them and bursts into flames. _Be careful, Corvo._ Even his own dreams are full of ridiculous symbolism and puzzles now. He is asleep, but he feels dreadfully, bone-achingly tired of all this. “Why won’t you just talk plainly to me,” he says to the false Outsider. “Do I not interest you anymore? I’d say I’m glad, but you’re probably inciting this nonsense for your own amusement.”

 

Red tears streak down the false god’s cheeks. He opens his mouth, and flies pour out, streaming at Corvo in a buzzing wave. Panic grips him; the fear that if he turns around Emily will be there, weeping blood and vomiting dust, and he will have to cut her throat for mercy. The Void bellows, _You cannot stop death. It is inevitable and inescapable. The very nature of existence demands its end._

 

 _I can’t run, but I can hide,_ something whispers in his ear, hot breath nuzzling close. Corvo fights to keep from screaming.

 

He looks down. The statue of Jessamine outside the old Chamber of Commerce is below him, whale oil seeping from a gash in its face. The Outsider’s fingernails have cut him open, gutted him from collar to pelvis, and he is bleeding bone charms, a torrent of carved runes falling from his insides. _Farewell, Corvo. May we never meet again._ The false Void is imploding, collapsing from the inside out. Daud’s knife slices clean through his vocal cords.

 

“What do you _mean_?” he shouts at his own mind. The false Outsider laughs, eyes blue as the sea.

 

Corvo tosses and turns in his bed, and when he wakes the night’s imagery has fled his mind. He remembers only that he is very, very annoyed by how cryptic it all was.

 

~

 

Today passes swiftly. It is apparently a cleaning day for the tower, so Corvo is thrown out of his own chambers after his secrets are safely locked away. He relocates reluctantly to the library for the morning, prevented from going about his usual spymaster’s business in the more public room. Emily passes through a few times, commiserating and recommending him a volume on Pandyssia that Sokolov had given her. It is not a productive morning.

 

He does, however, discover something interesting as he works - a small selection of books on heretics and their rituals tucked out of sight in his chosen corner of the library. Overseers study these things, probably, but it is still unusual to see a volume entitled ‘Summoning the Outsider’ displayed brazenly in the Imperial library. Outside of Sokolov’s collection, that is.

 

 _The port side eye of whale, newly dead/Plop it in the pot, grisly and red_ \- where has he heard that one before? Corvo finds it bemusing in a ghastly way that there are people who desperately want to have the Outsider visit them, that there are people who drive themselves mad trying to catch his eye. He didn’t even have to try.

 

Not that he has those bragging rights these days. He has the Mark, but that’s all. The Outsider no longer talks to him, and Corvo truly doesn’t know if that worries him or not. Sometimes he feels like a burden was lifted from him, that day the Outsider vanished for the last time, and sometimes he almost misses him. There’s - it’s ridiculous, but there’s nobody he can _talk_ to anymore. Emily is Emily, and Callista and her uncle are friendly but don’t have any idea about what’s under the bandage on his hand, and Cecelia and Samuel live quite far away now, if Samuel was still speaking to him in the first place. The Outsider knew everything about his circumstances without having to be told.

 

On second thought, that was perhaps one of the main negatives of having him for an infrequent conversational partner. Corvo shuts the volume and shelves it. Missing the Outsider. What is the world coming to.

 

 _The end is near_ , his mind reminds him. He tells it to shut up.

 

A maid informs him that his chambers are dusted, so he takes his papers back upstairs and works on letters until evening meal, and then heads up to the roof.

 

The summit of Dunwall Tower is blessedly clear. Only a few guards patrol up here, and the late Lord Regent’s safe-room was demolished six years ago, at Corvo’s own request, so the view is unparalleled from anywhere else in Dunwall, except perhaps the top of Kaldwin’s Bridge. He finds it comforting to walk up here late in the day. Wind whips through his hair; he looks out across the sea and breathes deep.

 

He closes his eyes, just for a second. The wind picks up, turning harsh and stinging his cheeks, roiling his stomach at the sudden inertia he feels. Odd. Corvo opens his eyes-

 

And finds himself plummeting towards the ground at half a million miles an hour.

 

He gasps, inhaling so sharply that it burns his throat, scrabbles for purchase in the air and finds none. At the speed he’s moving, trying to reach for a handhold would likely rip him limb from limb. He could Blink - he tries, and feels the horrible sensation of his Mark flaring empty, drained and useless. He hasn’t used it since yesterday, there’s no reason it should be like-

 

The windblast in his room, he thinks numbly. If he’d Blinked up, the highest he could possibly stretch, without meaning to - all his energy, gone in an instant, and now he’s about to become a dark stain somewhere on the tower’s grounds-

 

There is a hand on his shoulder.

 

The Void sings around him, the _real_ Void, and Corvo turns to look into the blackest eyes in this world or the next. “Really,” he says.

  
“Hello, Corvo,” the Outsider says. “Nice of you to drop in.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello !! thank you for the nice comments on the previous chapter & i hope yall like this one... i've decided my update schedule is going to be basically 'whenever i finish the chapter that comes afterwards' so hopefully that'll add up to a weekly sort of thing. come check out my tumlr aerynlallaboso if you want to catch #sneak #peeks/me complaining abt writing

Memory plays tricks on everyone, sometimes, but as Corvo readjusts to his surroundings, he is absolutely sure that this place is not as he remembers it.

 

The Void where he has landed - for lack of a better word - is not blue. It is grey, a sky coloured with ash and corpse-dust. He doesn’t recognise the fragmented mash of buildings around him, either, though he supposes it presumptuous to think that it would always conform to a location he knows. Before, the Outsider had always seemed to prepare it for him.

 

The Outsider himself is mostly unchanged. The hard stare he levies at Corvo is familiar, and the monotonous voice. The pressure of his hand on Corvo’s shoulder is not. The Outsider has never touched him before, not even to give him the Heart.

 

“It’s been two years.” A wave of nausea surges through him; he was falling through the air only seconds ago, falling to his death. “Are you responsible for what just happened to me?”

 

“Indirectly.”

 

“Something happened to my Mark,” Corvo says slowly. “Your _gifts_ keep activating themselves without my awareness. And the Heart is warning me that something is coming to an end, and I received a letter that nearly killed me, and now you’re here. I should’ve known you would come.”

 

The Outsider’s face is blank as a sheet of paper. “You aren’t pleased.”

 

“Just - tell me what’s going on. Or at least, what you want from me.”

 

The first time the Outsider visited him, it was in a fitful sleep six months after everything changed forever, the night he broke out of prison. _Your life has taken a turn, has it not?_ He was motivated by curiosity, Corvo guesses, or boredom or whatever else drives him to choose his Marked.This time, he senses something different - the condition of the Void, for one - and he is proved correct when the Outsider simply says, “Your help.”

 

Corvo looks at him. “You’re a god,” he says. “How could I possibly help you?”

 

A shockingly bitter smile worms its way onto the Outsider’s face, like an ugly wound filled with teeth. Corvo recoils. “As you may have noticed, the Void is experiencing an upheaval right now. The tides are shifting in the heavens; a turmoil is coming that will soon shake this place right down to its bones. An intervention is needed. Your intervention, Corvo. It is for this reason that I re-appear to you.”

 

So it wasn’t his choice to break his silence? He feels a pinprick of offence, and then a further prick of annoyance that he even cares enough to be offended. “What do you need from me?”

 

The Outsider tilts his head. “Surprising,” he observes. “I never expected you to be this obliging, now that you have a semblance of a normal life back. Normal is as normal does, though, and what I want you to do for me is anything but normal.”

 

“What _is it_ ,” Corvo says, wearily.

 

“Stone from Dunwall Tower’s foundation, ground into dust. Dried river krust.” The smile returns, perhaps in amusement at his own rhyme. “Oh, and the tears of Red Jennie. Bring me these, and perhaps your Mark will start to calm itself.” The Outsider leans forward; Corvo cannot remember him ever being this close before. His cheekbones are starkly visible in the Void’s dim lighting, standing out as if his skin is stretched too tight. “Something I never told you, Corvo. Your Mark links us, you and I, between the Void and your world. Whatever happens to me, happens to you.”

 

Questions spring to Corvo’s lips. He has no chance to ask them before the Void folds around him, a metallic sound like a train screeching to a stop ringing in the air, and then he is standing on the roof of Dunwall Tower. He stands, dizzy, staring out at the city far across the river, for what seems like an hour, until his legs give out and he lapses into unconsciousness.

 

~

 

He wakes in his own bed, a warm cloth lying heavy on his forehead. There isn’t a clue as to what time it is, nor how long he’s been asleep, but the sun has gone down and all that streams through his windows are long fingers of darkness. Emily is sitting beside his bed.

 

“You should be asleep,” he mumbles to her.

 

“No I shouldn’t, silly. It’s barely past eight.” Ah. He wasn’t out that long, then. “You were making funny faces in your sleep. Bad dreams?”

 

“I don’t remember,” Corvo lies, sitting up. The cloth slips off his face; he catches it neatly and squeezes it between his palms reflexively, savouring the last dregs of its heat on his cold hands. His daughter looks at him sharply.

 

She can tell, he realises. “I had Sokolov look you over,” she says. “Just your head, and your legs. You scraped your knees falling over. Did you… faint? He didn’t think you seemed otherwise sick, but you weren’t awake, so he couldn’t sound your chest or anything.” She pauses. “I kept him away from your bandaged hand.”

 

A small, sick feeling bites at his stomach. “Thank you.”

 

“Are you ever going to show it to me?” Emily says. “I know it’s there.”

 

The sick feeling intensifies. Corvo winces, finally feeling his knees begin to smart under his blanket. “It’s better if I don’t,” he says quietly. “Did Sokolov leave anything for the pain?”

 

She raises her hands in a mock surrender. She’s dressed for bed, despite her claim that it’s not that late - violet silk pyjamas and a thin black jacket in an asymmetrical cut, for the cold. “I did ask, but he said that you’re strong and that we’re running low on supplies for that sort of thing. His way of hinting that I don’t allot him enough money for his experiments. You know, his _private projects_ that aren’t even part of his job description. At this rate I’m thinking of firing him and having Piero assume his position as well.”

 

“It would be too hard on him, with the fevers. Best not.”

 

They stay quiet for a few moments, reflecting on Piero. His condition has worsened in the past year, and his brilliant mind has begun a sharp decline that Corvo aches to see, made worse by the fact that the Outsider no longer visits his dreams. He abandoned all of them when he abandoned Corvo. And now he expects him to do his bidding.

 

Perhaps the worst thing is, he isn’t wrong. _Foundation stone, river krust, and the tears of Red Jennie_. Small things that he says can stop some kind of catastrophe in the Void from occurring. Corvo wishes he’d asked for details. He wishes he’d asked what the Outsider meant exactly by ‘what happens to me, happens to you’, even though he can probably guess. If the Outsider ceases to exist-

 

He is a god, he reminds himself. Gods cannot die. But whoever heard of a god that had not existed for all of eternity? Four thousand years is nothing compared to the longevity of the current world.

 

Emily reaches over and takes the cloth from him. Her long-fingered hand is warm. “Get some rest,” she says. “I need my Lord Protector healthy and ready to make a decision on that thing we talked about.”

 

He manages a small smile. “It’s only been a day, Em. Give me some more time.”

 

“Two days, technically, but you hit your head, so I won’t hold it against you.” She hesitates over her next words, swaps them for a returned smile. “Be careful, Corvo. Good night.”

 

_Be careful_. He watches her leave, slipping out the door and closing it gently behind her, and it occurs to him that she wears the colours of the Outsider’s shrines. The realisation terrifies him more than he could ever say. If there’s one thing he wants more than anything else in the world, it is for Emily’s dreams to be unvisited.

 

The bed creaks under his shifting weight, protesting his exit. There are still things he can do before he has to sleep.

 

~

 

For anyone else, getting access to the lowest levels of Dunwall Tower might be something of a difficult or impossible endeavour, but Corvo has only to ask the way. Lucky for him. He traipses down the staircase towards the kitchens, boots scuffing newly polished floors and clammy fingers making long track-marks on the banisters. He should apologise to the maids later, he supposes.

 

Plans of the tower conveniently leave off a cramped, unpowered metal lift installed in the basement storage in times long past. It was created to transport people and cargo underneath the tower through a thinly dug shaft, stopping just short of plunging them into the river so that they could perform some sort of maintenance - possibly to the old water-lock system, he isn’t quite sure. Regardless, with a fresh whale oil tank, it should get him access to the foundation stone without needing to find a patch of unguarded floor and digging. He can only imagine what excuse he would need to come up with for that.

 

The few servants still on duty in the kitchen pay no notice to him when he passes through. Except for - “Lord Protector! What can we do for you this fine evening?”

 

Ernest Ramsley, living up to his name. He is a tall man with over-long pale hair and three missing fingers, the one who Emily said ‘likes him’, and Corvo finds nothing in his behaviour to dispel the notion. “Nothing much,” he says, intending to stride past without a backwards glance. “Although… Do you have a roasting skewer? A metal one.”

 

“Uhh… We do. Plenty of them. Might I ask what you need it for?”

 

“No, you may not,” Corvo says.

 

With the skewer tucked under his arm, he makes a brief stop at the lowest guard post for a spare tank of whale oil, avoiding their curious looks. One jokes, “Stopping another assassination plot, Lord Protector? I’d damn sure like to roast anyone who even thought about killing the Empress on one of those skewers.”

 

His fellow officer snorts. “We’d have to roast half the nobles, then.” He glances at Corvo. “Hope you’re ready for what’s surely coming next month, sir. Vipers everywhere. Almost miss the Masked Felon thinning out their numbers.”

 

Corvo jerks.

 

“I saw him once.”

 

“You did not. Nobody ever saw him, or if they did, they didn’t live to talk about it. I saw his _work_ once. Three men with their throats slit and dumped in a corner.” He keeps talking while Corvo tries his best not to listen, as if he is as invisible as he once seemed when he prowled plushly carpeted corridors wearing _that mask_. He is still talking when he leaves.

 

The tiny lift barely accommodates him and his load, once he finds it. He has to dip his fingers into his now-filled oil tank and carefully smear some around the oil tank receptacle to clean the thing of rust enough that its magnetism will draw the tank in properly, a testament to exactly how old it is. Even the receptacles in the old Greaves Refinery still worked after a good few years of disuse. The lift creaks and scrapes like the old walkways there when he activates it. He wipes his oily hands gingerly on his jacket.

 

A few endless moments pass, the lift trundling downwards. Corvo can hear the water below him; soon enough, he can feel it as well, lapping at his boots. The water level must’ve risen since this shaft was constructed. He looks up at the stone above and around him and takes out the roasting skewer.

 

It works well for a rudimentary lever. A shovel would’ve been too big in this cramped space, but the metal stick sinks with surprising bite into the stone, softened by years of water splashing up against it. He’ll have a good-sized chunk when he’s finished, which he is quite quickly. The stone falls into his arms; he nearly drops it into the bottom of the lift but saves it at the last moment from crashing through the floor and likely destroying it. Another death avoided, he thinks wryly. The third in nearly as many days.

 

The return trip upwards is slower due to the stone’s weight, and it is nearly eleven when Corvo emerges from the lift cradling it in his arms. He looks around, checking that nobody is anywhere near, before he drops it onto the floor. It makes a sharp thud. Small pieces around the uneven edges break off and scatter.

 

After a brief pause for consideration, he raises the skewer and stabs the stone. He truly cannot be bothered going off and searching for a pick-axe or something similar at this time of night, not to mention having to pass that guard post again more than once. The stick serves its purpose, along with aid from his arms and feet. Pieces of the stone shatter again and again, are sliced open and doubled and ground until they are nothing more than a thick silver-grey dust.

 

Corvo finds it almost therapeutic. Especially the half-minute where he imagines the Outsider’s pretty stone-white face in place of the target for his kicks and stabs - cruel and petty, perhaps, but safer than trying to strike the real thing.

 

“What do I do now?” he asks the empty air when he’s finished. “You have your foundation stone. How do I deliver it to you?”

 

He doesn’t expect an answer, let alone the sudden appearance of the person he’s talking to, but the Outsider is _there_. He floats leisurely about a foot above Corvo’s handiwork, lips pursed and arms crossed. “This will do.”

 

“How did you - I thought you could only appear at your own shrines-”

 

“I can be wherever I choose.” The Outsider sounds… distracted. Cold, distant, like he is listening to two people at the same time. It comes to Corvo that perhaps he is - perhaps he has other Marked out doing these same things, helping him collect dust and tears. After all, Corvo is not special to him. He proved that when he disappeared for two years. “I simply choose not to be. If you must know, it is your Mark rather than the shrines that provides a tether for me to anchor myself to when I appear in your world.”

 

“I have questions,” Corvo says. “About the catastrophe you mentioned. Will it affect only the Void? Or will there be repercussions here? Emily-”

 

The Outsider bends down in mid-air and scoops up a large handful of stone-dust in one graceful motion. “Thank you, Corvo,” he says, cutting him off. “I won’t need the dried river krust from you anymore, but I will be waiting for Red Jennie’s tears. I will know when you have them.” And then he isn’t there anymore.

 

How absolutely typical. Corvo leaves the ruined roasting skewer on the ground, in the dust, and heads back upstairs. The physical exertion has left him in need of a good night’s sleep - he hopes against hope that he will not dream.

 

~

 

Once upon a time, Corvo had known the Outsider only as the bogey-man of the Overseers, a shadowy and menacing presence who sought every opportunity to corrupt the souls of the innocent to darkness. Stories circulated around the city of Outsider worshippers performing arcane rituals, blood sacrifices, turning gibbering mad when their black god refused to answer them. He hadn’t put much stock in them at the time. He had no love for the Abbey, but neither did he see the sense in courting the Brand by pointing out that many of these heretics turned to the blasphemous out of desperation, once the city could no longer sustain them. That was just the way it was in Dunwall. The Overseers certainly weren’t about to offer housing or food to the common rabble when they could use the space for their weaponry or their hideous trained hounds.

 

Now, he knows most of the stories are probably true. Now he knows the Outsider has black holes in place of eyes and gifts supernatural powers to those he finds ‘interesting’, and demands nothing more than a good show in return. Corvo has never thought of himself as a worshipper of the Outsider, nor even a disciple. He is simply entertainment. At the moment, he is something like hired help.

 

In the days when he slept in the Hound Pits Pub by night and roamed the streets as the Masked Felon by day - and night too sometimes - he had thought his relationship, if it could be called that, with the Outsider was more mutual, a kind of fascination from both ends. He felt special, _chosen_ , even when he discovered he was not alone in being Marked. And if he was being used as a pawn, at least the Outsider had the decency not to poison him and dump him in the river.

 

The silence he has endured these past years has curdled his goodwill towards the Outsider like spoilt milk, and he hates the anger that seeps into his bones alongside the cold. Wind blows hard through the city today. Corvo pulls his coat tighter and his hood lower. A necessary precaution, since his face is even more recognisable than it used to be, and he can’t wear the mask. Not for this, anyway.

 

The high white-washed facades of the Distillery District rise around him, hiding darker backstreets behind them. He’s been here many times, knows all the shortcuts to the rooftops, but his westward heading won’t require them. One of his contacts knew the name Red Jennie the instant they heard it - unluckily, they couldn’t connect it to a person. Instead, they named a place. The Oxrush Pub. Corvo paid them, deferred Emily’s offer of practice together, and dressed inconspicuously.

 

“You sure you don’t want me to check it out for you?” his contact had said, examining the unmarked coin purse all his agents received for their troubles. “I mean, I got time. It must be real big if you’re going to the worry of speakin’ to me directly instead of the dead drop or a letter-”

 

“That’s exactly why I have to do it myself.”

 

The contact shrugged. “Suit yourself. Thanks for the coin.”

 

The Oxrush Pub has the look of an old, cultured establishment, the front spanking clean and kept meticulously free of flyers and graffiti, an impressive feat for a building tucked between a two busy warehouses. Brown brick and polished wood glow gently in the early morning light, and a small bell chimes lightly when Corvo passes through the front door, nodding at the man with the fake smile leaned up against the storefront. On the lookout for the Watch no doubt, and for good reason, because the Oxrush is crawling with scumbags head to toe. The contrast between the gleaming outside and rotten patronage strikes him as the direct opposite of the old Hound Pits.

 

He hasn’t been back there in quite a while. Samuel slammed the door in his face last time.

 

Corvo takes a seat at the bar and orders a drink. Two men are discussing something in whispers besides him, in code too by the fragments he can hear. The sparrow this and the bull that. He slips the bartender an extra coin and the man looks at him oddly. “Are you the one?” he asks.

 

“The one what?”

 

“Someone was in here earlier, saying a man might come by looking for Red Jennie. I haven’t seen you round my establishment before.”

 

Outsider’s blood, Corvo thinks, and knocks back half his drink in one mouthful. He very much wants to hunt down the agent he spoke to this morning and either break their neck or leave a gruff note in place of their pay, depending on how he feels when he gets there. At least they’ve apparently made this a lot easier for him. “And you’d know where Red Jennie is, would you?”

 

Another curious look, this time a touch bemused as well. “It’s not like it’s a secret. What, you think she’s some kind of gang leader or something?”

 

“I don’t have any idea who she is,” says Corvo, cursing every one of the Outsider’s body parts.

 

“I won’t even ask why that’s so,” the bartender says. “She lives in one of those rundown apartments near Kaldwin’s Bridge, squatting next door to one of those nobles who got screwed by plague. Or where they used to be, anyway. Good fucking riddance.” He eyes Corvo draining his glass. “She’s called Red Jennie on account of the plague too. Lost three children to it and now she does nothing but cry all day. Weeping for the weepers. You going to put her out of her misery?”

 

“No.”

 

“Almost seems a shame. She deserves a rest.”

 

Corvo pushes his glass away from him. “Thanks,” he says. “You’ve been very helpful.”

 

“Any time,” the bartender calls after him as he leaves. He can feel the gazes of the other patrons on him, studying the hooded figure before deciding that he poses no threat to them. They must be lesser criminals than he thought if they can’t even recognise the lines of a well-trained, well-armed soldier. Not even worth donning the mask for.

 

Kaldwin’s Bridge is usually a good half-hour by boat, longer on foot. Contrary to Samuel’s assumptions all those years ago, Corvo had visited it before with Jessamine during a parade of some sort long before he came back to kidnap Sokolov. He still remembers the route they walked and the positions of all the guards that day, so often had he drilled himself on them. Her safety was his priority at all times. Now she is dead, and he makes it his business to know the city like the back of his hand so he can guard their daughter.

 

The bartender gave him no exact address. There are multiple apartments on the river, most due to be demolished by demand of the nobles who are currently repossessing the richer estates. Merchants, squatters, poor families of workers who can just afford the rent to live in a former plague victim’s house with a view - all will be turned out, most likely. He sees bare mattresses and piles dirty clothing through the windows and balcony doors he creeps past, squinting when the noon sun reflects off the tall steel pylons of the Bridge.

 

A woman shuffles by a window on the second floor of the building across the street. Corvo stops and watches her, perched on a balcony rail. She has dark hair streaked with grey and matted with dirt, and clutches something to her chest. Folded clothing, perhaps. He readies his Blink for when she turns away.

 

She doesn’t. She stands by the window, looking down at the street below. Her eyes are glassy and red; her hands are covered with the kind of calluses and scratches Corvo associates with machine work. They loosen around the clothing she’s holding, and half of it unfolds to reveal what it is: a child’s dress, originally white but so stained that it appears patterned. There are drips of old blood on the collar.

 

“Red Jennie,” Corvo says quietly to himself. His target begins to cry, like she hears him, like she knows what he’s about to do. Her tears fall heavy on the stained dress.

 

He Blinks, and time slows. The two are not connected - he activates both abilities at once, enduring the straining feeling in his hands so that he can avoid looking at Red Jennie when he wrenches the dress from her. Her grip is tighter than a weeper’s. A matched pair of tears glisten in the grey, timeless air, and Corvo reaches out and catches one with his finger. Intense pity sweeps through him.

 

Another Blink. He is gone, and Red Jennie is left without her precious keepsake. She still has her tears, though. He can hear her crying louder as he scales a drainpipe and begins the walk back to the tower. His energy is nearly expended from stopping time; he decides to use the last of it to Blink across the bridge. The dress is safely stowed under his jacket for whenever the Outsider wants to come and pick it up.

 

Then, suddenly, he is in the air again. He is falling. The bottom drops out of Corvo’s stomach. He tries to shout, and it comes out as a _caw_! _Caw_!

 

_Possession_. The world is a sickly green haze around him. Once again, his Mark has come to life of its own will, propelling him unexpectedly into the body of a bird lazily circling the bridge. Corvo flails his arms - flaps his wings - and guides the bird down to one of the small docks on the west side. He leans back, mentally, forcing his consciousness out and into his own reformed body.

 

The bird _caws_ and takes off. It is a crow.

 

“I have what you wanted,” Corvo says, watching it disappear into the sky. He takes the child’s dress out from under his jacket. It smells of dirt and sweat and salt. Tears. “Is there anything you can do to stop that from happening?”

 

“No,” the Outsider says. He is sitting in one of the wooden fishing boats tied to the small dock, looking for all the world like a normal person if one doesn’t peer too closely at his ashen complexion and terrifying eyes. It makes Corvo nervous that he isn’t hovering like he usually does. “It will get worse. I advise you to be on your guard.” He holds out his hand, and Corvo gives him the dress. He - sniffs it. “Hmm. An unexpected bonus.”

 

Corvo doesn’t ask what he means. “What are you going to do with it?”

 

“A ritual. It should pacify the Void for a time.” The dress vanishes. “The waves are getting stronger. They crash against the rocks and shattered places of my world. If we don’t stop them, they will wash it all away.”

 

“Wash _what_ away? There’s nothing in the Void. That’s why it’s called the Void.”

 

The Outsider’s thin brows knit together. “There’s me,” he says, his voice distant and chilling again. “Thank you for your assistance, Corvo. I may call on you again.”

  
_He is a god_ , Corvo thinks on his way back to the tower. _He cannot die_ , he murmurs into his pillow when he beds down for the night, even while the Heart throbs a warning beat into the air from its box beside him. _Nothing will happen to him, or to me_ , even as his Mark prickles like a thousand tiny needles just before he falls asleep.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank u all for the comments last ch :") ill probably post the next one pretty soon bc it's nearly finished (im just messing w the editing) and also bc... well... Read On...

It is two weeks before Emily’s birthday, and preparations are beginning to reach a fever pitch. Corvo spends most of his time at her side, planning security or being accosted by Sokolov - “I heard rumours, Corvo, that the Empress is going to make an _announcement_ at the main event - who told me? Nonsense, it’s obvious. She has your mouth. I was thinking, as a commemoration, that a portrait-”

 

“No,” Corvo tells him. “Not so soon.”

 

Sokolov takes the rejection with raised eyebrows and a pleased look, evidently taking ‘not so soon’ to mean ‘perhaps six months’. Emily would certainly be happy with his proposal if she heard it, even enamoured, which is why Corvo does everything he can to keep her occupied and away from her Royal Physician.

 

In his spare time, he secretes volumes from the library’s section on heretical rituals and wraps the bandages more tightly around his left hand. The Outsider has been absent for a long five days, and Corvo feels heavy with quiet anger. ‘I may call on you again.’ His Mark hasn’t settled, not even close - he’s been careful to remain out of sight when shadowing Emily, in case he Blinks or blasts at random again. He cannot find any reference to the ingredients the Outsider asked for in the books he reads, not that he really expected to. The god keeps his secrets close.

 

About the only thing he has managed to make personal progress on is tracking the sender of his flaming letter. Using Eustace Chareton’s name was a mistake on their part. An inquiry to her brought up the fact that she had indeed sent a letter to Corvo, a note requesting that he investigate suspected sabotage to a trading ship that docked at Fraeport some three weeks ago. That at least points to the sender being from Morley and having knowledge of Chareton’s troubles, and Corvo greatly suspects that whoever tried to kill him will be in Dunwall now. Call it a hunch.

 

He still also suspects that the person he is searching for is Daud. Another hunch, supported by even less than his others. All his information points to Daud having fled back to Serkonos after he spared his life - an act he _greatly_ regrets - and yet he cannot shake the feeling. Who else would know about his mark?

 

Who indeed. The Outsider could’ve Marked half a dozen more people while he was away, told them all of his former favourite Corvo Attano, now fallen from grace and the Outsider’s personal standards of interesting by daring to claw his way up out of the gutters.

 

He has decided to accept Emily’s request, when she brings it up again.

 

“Lord Protector,” a voice interrupts his reverie. “There’s someone to see you.”

 

“Who?” Corvo asks, glancing away from where Emily is sitting discussing policy with the current High Overseer, an odious but sufficiently pious woman who is notorious for being both vertically challenged and sensitive about it. A visitor will be a welcome distraction from having to listen to her ask for yet more revisions to Imperial law to add mention of the Strictures. As if she can’t see that the Abbey is falling apart piece by piece.

 

“A woman. She gave her name as -” the guard clears his throat. “Cecelia. No surname or title, so I was inclined to turn her away, but-”

 

“No, no, I’ll see her,” Corvo says. “Where is she?”

 

Cecelia is waiting in his office, leaning up against his desk. Her ginger hair has grown longer since he last saw her, and it curls pleasantly under her customary dark cap. She stands to attention when he enters. “Corvo! Hello.”

 

He waves her down, smiling, and accepts a brief hug, hands not quite touching her back. No need to add fuel to the fire likely started by the Lord Protector receiving a female guest in his chambers. “Is there something you needed to tell me urgently?” he enquires. “I got your letter last week. My reply wouldn’t have reached you yet.”

 

“Oh, I’m not here on business.” Cecelia sweeps out her hands. “I’m here to invite you to dinner. At the Hound Pits, tomorrow night.”

 

“Dinner?”

 

“For Emily’s birthday,” she explains.

 

Corvo frowns, scratches his head. “That… isn’t for two weeks. Does she know about this?”

 

“Oh, yes. She asked me to ask you because she’s so tied up in meetings at the moment. It was her idea to have a private little thing before all the official parties, with just a few old friends. A reunion of sorts.” Cecilia smiles. “Funny thinking after all this time we’d _want_ to reunite back at the pub when so many terrible things happened there.”

 

“She could’ve asked me herself,” Corvo says, sighing. He agrees with her sentiment, for the most part. His last memories of the Hound Pits - besides Samuel’s door-slamming - are of sneaking past soldiers to find a terrified letter from Emily, of burning a battalion’s worth of men to ashes with Piero’s experimental arc pylon. He supposes Emily’s are better. She’s gone back there with Callista more than once over the years, to recover drawings and visit people who won’t talk to Corvo. She even bought the blasted place.

 

“Well, the invitation got to you either way. Will you come?”

 

How could he not? “Of course. If Emily will be there, I’d have to attend as her bodyguard regardless of whether I wanted to come or not. Though I do,” he reassures Cecelia, before something occurs to him. “Samuel… will be there, won’t he?”

 

“I’m sure Emily’ll keep him in line,” she says immediately. She’s obviously been waiting for him to realise this the whole time. “He wouldn’t do anything to spoil her good mood. No matter how much he resents you for - well. You… know.”

 

 _I’m disappointed in you, Corvo. It’s like you’ve gone out of your way to be brutal._ “I know,” Corvo says. _You weren’t_ there, he’s always wanted to tell the old man, take him by the shoulders and _shake_ him and show him Jessamine lying dead on the ground in front of him - but it’s been years, and Samuel’s perceptions of him won’t be changed now. They can surely be civil for one night. “It’ll be alright. Thank you for telling me.”

 

“My pleasure. It’s always nice seeing you again in person,” Cecelia says. “You look healthier than you did back then. You were always so pale and quiet.” She looks away. “I guess I was too. We were all so… frightened in one way or another.”

 

Corvo places a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll see you tomorrow night,” he says. “Emily will be very glad to get out of the tower for a while.”

 

Her cap slips down over her eyes and she pushes it back up with the heel of her hand. “She’ll have a good time,” she promises.

 

He sees Cecelia out himself, complimenting her on her work with the Laundryman, as the noble she quite literally hung out to dry has been nicknamed amongst his contemptuous contemporaries, and returns to the boardroom. The High Overseer passes him on her way out. She wears an expression of intense irritation, her eyelids drooping so low as to nearly obscure her eyes completely.

 

“Lord Protector,” she says. Her tone is polite, veiling disgust.

 

“High Overseer,” Corvo says, in the perfectly bland voice of a perfect courtier.

 

Inside the boardroom, he finds Emily engaged in conversation with Sokolov, much to his dismay. Her papers from the prior meeting are neatly folded on the table, a copy of the Seven Strictures pamphlet atop them beside a pencil sketch that the Royal Physician is presenting to her with great aplomb.

 

“Corvo! Come over and listen to this,” Emily says, confirming his fears. “Sokolov was just telling me that he thought a portrait of the two of us might make a good birthday present for me this year. Isn’t that nice? Me and my - Lord Protector.”

 

“Aren’t birthday presents supposed to be a surprise?” He casts a dark look at Sokolov, who wavers not an inch from his position. Perhaps he thinks if he does this for Emily, she’ll give more thought to funding his private projects - probably research into the Outsider, or the effects of his runes on the human body. Corvo is thankful yet again that Sokolov has no idea he’s standing mere metres away from the perfect test subject for that one.

 

“It would be partially a commemoration, if you agree to what I asked.” Her mouth is quirked in an expectant smile. “Sokolov said he already told you about it and you said no, but I’m sure you were just trying to be modest on my account, right? I shouldn’t have too many paintings of myself hanging around the tower or it will go to my head.”

 

He’s trapped. “Something like that,” he says. Emily’s command of words is truly terrifying sometimes; it’s a gift she inherited from her mother, the ability to sway crowds and corner reticent bodyguards with nothing but her voice. “I’ve… already made the decision to accept your proposal, Em, so I suppose a portrait wouldn’t be too much more to ask.”

 

The small smile turns to a beam, a shining spotlight directed at him. “ _Thank you_ , Corvo, thank you - you can go ahead and revise your sketch with what you suggested, Sokolov, I think that will be quite good.”

 

“As you wish, Your Grace. Corvo, if I could have a word with you?”

 

Sokolov retrieves the canvas he was showing to Emily, who tucks her papers under her arms and says she’s going to go back to her room, to give them some privacy. Corvo isn’t sure why they need it. He has nothing to say to the Royal Physician and his tufty, greying beard that the whole court couldn’t hear, unless Sokolov is about to reveal that he’s somehow discovered Corvo’s recent reacquaintance with the Outsider.

 

He hasn’t, but the Outsider is nonetheless the topic he broaches immediately. “I saw that you had thumbed through the section the library keeps on Outsider signs and rituals, nothing compared to my own collection but, I was wondering if you’d heard about it too,” Sokolov says, gruff and rushed.

 

“Heard about what?”

 

“The whales,” Sokolov says. “Dying. In large numbers, in the sea and the slaughterhouses. Not a surprise, you may say, but I’ve studied in a number of slaughterhouses myself, and the procedures they use to keep their whales alive and producing are quite effective. The number they’ve lost lately is unprecedented. I would simply suggest sabotage except for the fact that there are beached whales washing up on the coast now, more every day, all dead with no apparent cause. It’s some kind of sign. It must be.”

 

A chill runs down Corvo’s spine, which he is careful not to let show on his face. “Whales?”

 

“A symbol of the Outsider. I thought you’d read those books, damn it. He’s speaking to us somehow. Sending a signal to those that can understand it.” Sokolov scowls. “If only he’d show himself-”

 

“I don’t think the Overseers would be pleased to hear you wishing for that,” Corvo says. He means it only half as a warning; he just wants to shut Sokolov up so he can leave, get his own thoughts in order. Nobody has mentioned whales dying to him before. Possibly because he’s never asked. But he knows the significance of them to the Outsider - the great Leviathan, the whale hanging suspended in the Void beyond every landscape he’s ever seen there. Charms and runes carved of whalebone.

 

Sokolov’s frown deepens. “I doubt they’d even care,” he says. “They’d probably welcome the Outsider showing up in the High Overseer’s office right now. Might give them some more legitimacy, hmm?”

 

“Probably.” Wouldn’t that be a sight to see. The Outsider lounging in front of the monument inscribed with the Seven Strictures, hands tracing the engravings of his own name with a smug smile on his lips.

 

“Well, I shouldn’t keep you. Next time we meet it’ll be for this portrait, or at the Empress’s party, if the drink is to my liking.” Sokolov hefts his canvas up under his arm. “Until then.”

 

~

 

For the next day and a half, Corvo expends his energy checking Sokolov’s information, and finds it to be correct. He sends notes to agents and receives answers by the time dusk falls. Yes, they have seen the dead whales. They have all seen the dead whales and none of them thought to tell him because their interests are in human affairs, not potentially arcane zoological happenings.

 

He sighs. At least there is a report of leads on his letter-writer, to be followed up as soon as possible. Passenger lists on a ship that left Morley bound for Dunwall. The words blur before his eyes; he shakes his head to focus again and decides that his work day is over. Time to dress and gird himself for Emily’s birthday dinner.

 

~

 

The Empress is officially somewhere in the High Overseer’s office, called for a late night resumption of discussion on the Strictures, so any resemblance to her seen in the young woman strolling across Kaldwin’s Bridge and turning left, chattering about how excited she is to get out for the night, must be purely coincidental. She wears a hood and flat-footed boots and is flanked by a similarly dressed man and woman - her parents, passersby might assume. They are correct on only one count.

 

“I wish I didn’t have to wear this,” Emily exclaims, tugging at the drawstring on her hood. “It’s not letting the air in very well. The river has a nice smell, doesn’t it?”

 

“Would you rather be swarmed by your citizens?” Callista asks her mildly. Her own hood is not set quite so far forward. The comfort is afforded her by her relative anonymity compared to her companions; while most in Dunwall Tower would know the face of the Empress’ childhood tutor and friend, those on the street would be more familiar with the name Curnow from brushes with the City Watch.

 

Emily stops fiddling with her clothes. “I know, I know. We must be getting closer,” she remarks. “It would’ve been faster to go by boat, of course, but chartering something would’ve been impractical. Maybe I should have a rowboat made that I can take out by myself when nobody’s looking. They would never know I was gone.”

 

“I’d know,” Corvo says.

 

“That’s true. I don’t know how you do it, Father, keeping tabs on me at every minute of the day.”

 

Callista utters a small noise of surprise, looking between the both of them. She hasn’t been told, Corvo thinks, amused. “Emily-”

 

“One would think you have special powers,” Emily continues. Her voice is utterly dry, knowing, like she has just turned and winked at the two of them. She takes pity on Callista and adds, “I’m going to announce that Corvo’s my father at my birthday, my actual one. It won’t be a secret much longer.”

 

“I see,” Callista says.

 

They walk on, past shops closing up for the day, past the rusted plaque and warning signs marking the entrance to the Flooded District - or the Old Banking District, as they are now encouraged to call it - past a multitude of people who are entirely unaware that they are passing the Empress of the Isles on their way back home or to their favoured watering hole. The sun is just starting to turn orange and begin its nightly descent; clouds obscure it briefly before passing, letting beams of golden light lance across the horizon and momentarily blind Corvo. He can smell smoke, and salt and oil. Dunwall always smells of oil.

 

A block of old apartments comes into view. Emily’s pace picks up, her steps sounding an uneven beat on the pavement, at the sight of them and the worn advertisement plastered across a presumably well-compensated resident’s wall: the Hound Pits Pub, owned by the Empress herself! Former home of the Empire’s Loyalists! Corvo supposes it would dampen business to add that the Loyalists are mostly dead now, and in any case they hadn’t been overly loyal to begin with.

 

Past the apartments, there is the back road, curling around the pub proper and ending at the tower where Emily spent a week living when she was ten. The makeshift path of corrugated metal that used to lead from the landing outside Corvo’s attic room directly to Emily’s room has been removed in favour of restoring the staircase in the tower itself, and someone has at some point rigged a lift up the side of Piero’s old workshop so that the oil tanks on the roof can still be accessed. Corvo stares past the familiar buildings, out at the Wrenhaven, moss-choked water flowing like memories.

 

“We’re closed,” a rickety voice says when Emily knocks on the pub’s door. A figure is visible through the stained glass, the lines and white-crowned head immediately recognisable.

 

“It’s us, Samuel!” Emily is smiling, pressing her nose against the keyhole and framing her mouth with her hands so that her voice carries better. A joke. The pub has probably been closed for hours in anticipation of their arrival. “C’mon, let us in!”

 

The door opens, and Samuel Beechworth smiles at them all. His gaze roams over the three of them, settling for a long moment on Corvo. His mouth thins, but all he says is, “Oh, it’s you, Lady Emily. The guest of honour has arrived.”

 

Behind him, the pub is laden with streamers and tables covered with food that the chefs at Dunwall Tower might describe as ‘earthy’ and ‘classic’, euphemisms for ‘common’. Fresh fish, fruit, fried vegetables and a small mountain of sweets, accompanied by the best alcohol Samuel can scrounge up. Corvo spies Serkonan blood sausage and is reminded of the last party he attended here; he thinks he spies the ghost of Havelock nursing a brandy on the other side of the bar.

 

The ghost, unexpectedly, is Geoff Curnow. He raises his glass to them as Corvo takes off his hood, grinning at his surprised niece. “I managed to delegate my duties for the night,” he says by way of explanation. “The Empress let something slip and I thought it best to add to her security. No offence, Corvo.”

 

“None taken.” Cecelia waves at him from her seat in front of a large plate of fried dough twists. Beside her is Piero, talking animatedly about something that Corvo can’t quite hear from across the room, his fingers weaving in and out like a loom worker. “I welcome the help.”

 

Drinks are found for the newcomers. Corvo takes cider, Callista a brandy, and Emily sips juice that she claims is made with fish guts. “It’s from Baleton,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “And yes, I’m sure it’s not poison. I’m sure people from Baleton get tired of being asked that.”

 

“I have a cousin who lives there,” Cecelia says, and conversation turns towards distant family for a while as everyone makes their way to seats or perches and avails themselves of the spread of food. The atmosphere is lively, light, the sun setting through the windows and soft music playing from an audiograph that someone has to reset every few minutes. It’s quite relaxing. Corvo volunteers an anecdote about his sister, who he has not seen in many, many years - “I have an aunt!” Emily declares with surprise, “Why haven’t you ever mentioned her before?” - before drifting away to speak to Piero. He keeps his distance from Samuel intentionally. The old man does the same.

 

The night arrives in full, and all the pub’s lights are turned on inside and out. Emily takes the opportunity to steal a sip of whiskey, culminating in her downing an entire glass of the stuff and nearly being sick. “Silly,” Corvo reprimands her gently. She glowers back at him, and then glares at Callista and the others when they add their voices in agreement.

 

“I’m Empress _and_ birthday girl,” she says, as if that means the ill effects of whiskey couldn’t possibly apply to her. Corvo has to smile, couldn’t possibly do anything else.

 

“Would the Empress and birthday girl like cake?”

 

Emily’s mouth, open to deliver the rest of her biting rejoinder, snaps shut. “Yes, please,” she says.

 

“If only I could’ve bribed you like that every time you refused to do your homework when you were young,” Callista murmurs.

 

“I still am young,” Emily responds. Nobody can deny that she’s certainly the youngest person in the building, and the most vibrant. Corvo is reminded painfully of Jessamine’s youth, watching their daughter’s eyes light up when her purple-iced cake is presented to her, watching her smile gleefully when her friends sing an endearingly off-key happy birthday to her. She’s past the age her mother was when they’d first met. With her hair pinned up in just that way, she’d be her spitting image, bar the down-turned mouth she got from him.

 

Corvo looks away.

 

He tunes back in to the loud suggestion that, “We should stay overnight, don’t you think? For old time’s sake. I’m not sure I feel well enough to make the walk back to the tower. It mightn’t be safe in the dark.”

 

“You’d have Corvo _and_ Captain Curnow with you. Besides, the beds in the tower aren’t set up properly. You wouldn’t be able to have your old room.”

 

“Oh, the servants’ dormitory will do fine,” Emily says. “Or the floor in Corvo’s old room. I used to nap up there sometimes. You remember, right Callista?”

 

“I do. But, Emily-”

 

“I think it’s a good idea,” Corvo interrupts. “That is, if it’s alright with our hosts.” He casts a glance at Samuel, who raises both his eyebrows. “Emily can have my bed. Her presence in the tower shouldn’t be needed or questioned until the morning.” To tell the truth, he hadn’t been looking forward to the long walk back either. He would never call himself a lightweight, but, well, cider hits him hard after a certain number of glasses.

 

Cecelia says, “I’m in favour. You’ll be more hands to help clean up in the morning if you stay.”

 

Corvo wonders if she’s including Emily in that equation.

 

“Well, alright,” Samuel says, finally. He sniffs and rubs the heel of his hand across his eyes. “I don’t know about you, but I could just about collapse right here myself. You better get upstairs and start setting things up with blankets.”

 

They say farewell to Captain Curnow, who has become just ‘Geoff’ somewhere during the evening, and are all set to farewell Piero when he begins to talk about “Yes, yes, I should like to spend some time in my old work-room, where I made Corvo’s mask, it might help me remember that - the specifications to the oil refiner I was working on back then,” and Cecelia volunteers to see him to bed when he’s finished with his reminiscences. Samuel and Emily load up with blankets from the storeroom - Pendleton’s old haunt - and the party parades upstairs to bed.

 

Corvo has promised his old bed to Emily, so he takes a blanket and lays himself out on the floor beside Callista. The ceiling of the attic is unchanged, wooden beams criss-crossed in a pattern that is almost hypnotic to his tired mind, and he falls asleep before he has time to whisper a goodnight.

 

~

 

Déjà vu.

 

Emily is not sleeping on his bed. Callista is not sleeping on the floor next to him. There is no door to the rest of the Hound Pits behind him, and he suspects - _knows_ \- that when he staggers to his feet and walks through the doorway past his bed, the walls will open out into a great silver-coloured Void.

 

He yawns and reluctantly shifts out from under his blankets. On the wall beside his bed, a drawing is hung, many sheets of paper stuck together to form one hideous whole. His mask, sketched and coloured with a child’s hand and looking for all the world like the face of a demon, of a rotting corpse with flesh sloughing off. Corvo ignores it and makes for the door. There are gaps in the floorboards already.

 

Last time, the Outsider met him in front of the gazebo where Jessamine died, appearing out of a cloud of mist. This time, he is already here. There is no gazebo; the island of rock and wood on top of Corvo’s bedroom is a solitary speck in the Void. Glittering particles of dust drift through the grey air. “Corvo.”

 

“Hello,” Corvo says tiredly.

 

“Nostalgic, is it not?”

 

“Falling asleep and having you draw me into the Void against my will? Yes, very.”

 

The Outsider’s dark eyes have blue-purple circles under them, and his skin appears even more pinched than usual. “I have something else I require your assistance with,” he says. “Very soon now, a man named Thresh will be performing a ritual-”

 

“Did you know,” he begins like he’s making small-talk at an official function, “Did you know that the whales are dying?”

 

The Outsider _blanches_. “I - am aware.”

 

“Is that because of what’s happening in the Void? The wave you keep mentioning?” Corvo runs his Marked hand through his hair. “I just would like to know what I’m _doing_ , helping you. Collecting tears can’t be enough to stop something that can cause animals to start dying out of nowhere and Void knows what else in future.”

 

“I have others acting for me in your world,” the Outsider says. “Another of my Marked helped stem the tide with the ingredients you brought me.”

 

“Which one?”

 

“Corvo, Corvo - so many questions.” There is irritation in his tone. Strong irritation, impatience, other emotions Corvo can’t identify, and that in itself is unusual. The Outsider seems to _feel_ more every time he has visited in this changed, grey space, seems to shed more of his monotone and practiced disinterest. “Does it really matter? Don’t you trust me?”

 

Corvo laughs. “No.”

 

As soon as he says it, he realises, annoyed, that it isn’t true. He _does_ trust the Outsider, at least a little. He trusts him not to do something without a reason, even if that reason is that he’s bored.

 

The Outsider tilts his head, like he’s mulling this new information over. “Would you trust me more if I told you that your help is needed because my powers are… waning? As a result of the turmoil in the Void.” His mouth twitches. “I am loathe to admit it, but I am currently as dependent on you and your Marked brothers and sisters as you once were on the gifts I have given you.”

 

“I was never dependent on you or your powers.”

 

“You came to all of my shrines,” the Outsider says. “You hoarded my runes until you were afraid the cupboard in your attic would spill open from the weight of them pressing against the door. I _saw_ you, Corvo. I know of the drawer you keep in Dunwall Tower and how you would whisper my name as a prayer in the months after I-” He stops abruptly, his eyes narrowing.

 

It takes Corvo a moment to figure out why. “You were still watching me, weren’t you? After you stopped speaking to me. After you _abandoned_ me. I thought I wasn’t interesting enough to you anymore after I stopped being a masked assassin.”

 

“You remained as interesting as ever. It was only your circumstances that changed.” He sounds almost defensive. His expression wavers between indifference and a curious vulnerability that terrifies Corvo in its almost-humanity, and all anger suddenly flees Corvo’s body, all resentment towards this impossibly old god in the form of a young, young man replaced by fatigue. What is happening, in the Void, to cause such a shift in him?

 

“You mean, there was nothing to monologue to me about.”

 

The smallest smile, and the old Outsider is before him, smug and unknowable. “Perhaps.”

 

Neither of them speaks for a short time that stretches out into an age, the Outsider hanging in the Void patiently, waiting for Corvo to say, “So, what is you want me to do?”

 

“Not long from now, a man named Thresh will be performing a ritual in my name, using the blood of his servants to drench my shrine with red and call upon my powers.” A clacking of teeth. “He will not succeed, of course, but either way. I want you to make sure that the blood used in the ritual comes from Thresh’s own veins, not those of the innocent men and woman he employs. You may use whatever method you find most effective: slit Thresh’s throat, or bleed him while he sleeps. I’m sure you’ll put on a good show.”

 

The edges of Corvo’s vision fizz and blur and flatten, and the Outsider adds, in a low voice, “My dear Corvo.”

 

~

 

“Corvo!” is the first thing he hears when he regains consciousness. Oddly enough, he is lying on his old bed with blankets piled under him. He could’ve sworn he was on the floor last night.

 

The explanation comes with Emily’s worried expression from her seat at his bedside, his intensely dry mouth, and the noon sun streaming through the grimy attic windows. “How - long was I asleep?” he croaks.

 

“A good part of the day,” Emily tells him. “You wouldn’t wake up. We tried everything, water, loud noises, Samuel even slapped you-”

 

Corvo snorts.

 

“He was trying to help. I was just wondering if we ought to send for a doctor when your eyelids started to flutter.” She pauses; her eyes dart to his hand. “It wouldn’t have done anything, I guess.”

 

“I’m sorry.” Corvo hooks himself up on his elbow and groans at the way his head starts to throb. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, grimacing. “For worrying you. You should’ve just gone home, the Watch will probably be out looking for you by now.”

 

The Empress blows a raspberry. “Oh, it’ll be fine. I’m out on official business. Besides, how could I go home without my bodyguard attending me?” A sigh. “I do hope this isn’t going to become a regular occurrence, me waiting at your bedside.”

 

“It isn’t,” he assures her, but they both know he can’t promise it.

 

Emily helps him roll up all the blankets from the night previously, tucking them in a large bundle under his arm, and they both proceed downstairs, passing corridors that lead to rooms Corvo hasn’t seen in years and has no desire to anymore. The Loyalist Conspiracy still inhabits these walls, even if just as a name on the pub’s posters. Dust floats in the air. He is reminded of Lydia, who he always found sweeping no matter what hour of the day they met.

 

They are greeted by Callista - “I’m fine,” he replies to her queries, not meeting her eyes - and Cecelia and Samuel, preparing to open the pub to customers. The usual staff were given the day off at Emily’s request. “I must have lost this place some business sleeping so long,” Corvo says.

 

“Not much,” Cecelia says. “Most people like to drink here in the evenings. You can’t see how muddy the river is in the dark.”

 

“We should be off, then,” Corvo begins, but Emily interrupts him. “Oh, we forgot the blankets,” she exclaims. She crosses the room and pulls the bundle out from under Corvo’s arm. “I’ll take these back up, shall I?”

 

“I’ll help.” Callista takes half of Emily’s load and steers her towards the stairs again, and Corvo is suddenly alone in the pub with Samuel and - not Cecelia. He looks around for her, but she has vanished into some back room or the yard outside, leaving him standing awkwardly near the door with his arms still out. Samuel is stood behind the bar.

 

Corvo would have been perfectly content to stay in uncomfortable silence for the next minutes. Samuel apparently is not, because he says, corners of his mouth turned down in an unimpressed half-glare, “Emily said last night she’s going to have it out on her birthday that you’re her father.”

 

This is most definitely not a conversation Corvo wants to have. “She is.”

 

“So you’ll still be Lord Protector after that, hmm? Seems to me that combination of titles should have a law against it somewhere.” Samuel grunts. “Well. You’re the best person for the job, anyway. Even if I disagree with your methods, you’ve kept her safe all these years.”

 

“I don’t need your blessing,” Corvo says tersely.

 

“I ain’t giving it to you. Just sayin’ you’ve done right by Emily so far and I hope you’ll keep doing right by her. As her father.”

 

Blessedly, mercifully, Callista and Emily’s footsteps sound from behind him before Samuel can say anything else, or before Corvo can snap out something that would turn Samuel’s opinion of him blacker than it already is. “We’re ready to go,” Emily says, smiling, unaware of the frost tinting the atmosphere.

 

“Then let’s be off.”

 

More farewells are said, cheeks kissed, promises to be in touch soon or to come back to the pub when they get the chance, which for Emily likely won’t be for months and months. They fasten their hoods over their heads again, lower than before in protection from the bright daylight which picks out the young Empress’s features so much better than darkness. The pub’s door closes lightly behind them.

 

It opens again as they walk off in the direction of the bridge, and Cecelia jogs to catch up with them. “Corvo,” she calls. “I forgot to tell you - I went out this morning, and there was a sign at the-” She cuts off, stopping just short in front of him and leans up to whisper near his ear. “The Distillery drop. Something for you.”

 

“Thank you,” Corvo says. She smiles and waves a goodbye at them, turning back to the pub.

 

He catches Callista throwing a quizzical look at him and says, “Work business.”

 

~

 

After Emily is safely ensconced back in the tower, fielding questions from her trade advisor as to her whereabouts during the time they were _supposed_ to be having a very important meeting, Corvo sets out for the Distillery District. The drop Cecelia spoke of is not far back from the landing spot he used when he assassinated the late High Overseer. Funny, in a city this large, that he always seems to frequent the same places.

 

Here, by the shore, just down from that first security checkpoint used to be, thin unused pipes crack in various ways that makes them ideal for use by his agents as drops for messages or small items, covered with rocks or leaves or mud. Once, a live river krust had been stuffed into the hole into the pipe to hide an especially important delivery. Corvo had had to commend the sender on their ingenuity, though he took a few points off for the minor burn he got from krust spit on that occasion.

 

A thin chalk mark has been made on the wall opposite the piping, directly through old graffiti proclaiming that ‘the Outsider walks among us’. It would be dismissed by most; to Corvo, it means that something has been secreted in the west-most pipe. He reaches out to move the thick clump of dried mud covering its hole, when he notices the stillness of the air around him.

 

He can smell nothing. This close to the river, that should be impossible. Nothing makes a sound, nothing breathes. The sky is grey. Time is stopped. His Mark strains brutally against the muscles of his hand.

 

Corvo shakes his head and continues his work, ignoring the odd pain of mana deprivation. Beneath the mud the pipe is half-filled with revolting sewer water. He dips his hand in without hesitation, and comes out with a thin white block of card, cut with squares and patterns. An audiograph.

 

Time resumes on his way home, halfway back to the docks, to his great relief. He hadn’t been looking forward to potentially swimming back to Dunwall Tower if his boat and driver were temporarily frozen by his malfunctioning powers. It reminds him of this morning. The Outsider’s visits have always been brief and, in a way, _timeless_ , like the very act of him appearing warps the world around him. Especially at his shrines.

 

 _My powers are… waning_. Corvo supposes his long sleep is proof of it.

 

He pauses for nothing once he steps back onto solid ground. Guards greet him, welcome him back from his errand - he is focused on the audiograph burning a hole in his pocket and on thoughts of what the Outsider’s gradual decline means to him. The Abbey would certainly be happy, if someone were to tell them. Or perhaps they wouldn’t. Where would their religion be without the threat of the Outsider to motivate their piety?

 

His office door looms at the end of the corridor. He unlocks it and goes immediately to his desk, removing the blank audiograph card still in his player and slotting in the one from the drop. The player whirs and a high voice begins to speak.

 

“Checked the lists as requested. Checked the ports, too - see if they remember anyone asking about letters to the Empress or the Royal Protector. Got nothing. Heard from an old friend about some chemical that you can slap on paper, though. Got a funny name, like kero... kero-whatsit. Expose it to the air and it goes up like dry leaves. Useful for bombs and arson if you like that sort of thing.”

 

Corvo sucks in air. The cause of the burning letter.

 

“Got lucky with that one,” the voice continues. It sniffs. “Aren’t a lot of places you can get it in this city, seeing as it’s mostly an experimental chemical. Criminals prefer actual bombs. Found a parts store just ‘sides the bloody docks that had some. Hell of a coincidence. Threatened the guy until he told me someone bought some the day before the surprise, and they came from the direction of the passenger docks, not to mention he was just about to lock up when they came in _and_ he saw which way they went.” The voice sounds triumphant. “Not much thattaway except the old Greeberg Slaughterhouse and its warehouses, and half of ‘em are abandoned. Guess you’ll check it out yourself, boss.”

 

“I will,” Corvo says aloud. The audiograph clicks to a stop; he pulls the card out and pockets it for disposal in the tower’s furnace later. For now, he has somewhere to be.

 

~

 

The Greeberg Slaughterhouse - née Rothwild, before its owner’s mysterious disappearance a number of years ago and subsequent resale - is located directly on the water, for ease of access by the numerous ships from which it takes delivery of living whales, strung up and moaning that thick, eerie song they all make. Though it’s quite possible with the newest developments, Corvo reflects, that all they have been receiving lately are whale corpses instead. He can’t say he feels terrible that the animals’ suffering has been cut short.

 

He is wearing the mask, for this. It sits strangely heavy on his face after a long absence; he half expects to hear the shouts of the Watch after him the instant he dons it, in his bedroom shortly before clambering out of his window and borrowing a rowboat. He does not intend to hear those shouts today. He does not intend to be seen at all, which is why he takes the rooftops instead of the road. Rats infest his stomach, churning at the thought that _this could be Daud_ , he could be running right towards the hiding place of Jessamine’s killer again.

 

It might not be Daud. Of course. He might find nothing at all.

 

Warehouses line the streets leading up to the slaughterhouse. Before the rise of industrialisation that led to this area becoming known as Slaughterhouse Row, it used to be semi-residential, filled with the same sort of apartments that rose up all over Dunwall. After the plague hit, this was one of the only places where the local landowners eventually opted to sell and demolish instead of simply painting over the former tenants’ blood on the walls. If the landowners were alive, that is. Many of them had simply died and had their buildings repossessed by the government, who judged it good business to sell to merchants looking for new places to store their goods.

 

In some cases, they had been correct. In others, the warehouses had ended up as disused as the apartments that previously stood in their spots. One of these warehouses is where Corvo’s agent must surely have suspected the letter writing was hiding, and he thinks the same. Creeping along the top of the wide, ugly buildings, he can see in through the loft windows of those on the opposite side of the street with the magnification lens affixed to his mask, and what he sees is nothing. Exposed wooden beams and open space, perhaps the glimpse of a makeshift bed where a transient has broken in and spent the night.

 

That last is what he’s looking for, so he quietly smashes a loft window and Blinks inside. Twice, he finds no evidence that the owner has been there recently. Empty ale bottles and cheap cigars litter the floor around both beds, and the smell of whale oil is stronger than the stench of urine. Corvo wrinkles his nose and Blinks out, along to the next warehouse.

 

He reaches the end of the row after an hour, standing on the roof looking out over a high wall towards the slaughterhouse. He has already had the idea that the person he’s searching for might be hiding in the butchery itself, but discounted it. Daud - _whoever it is_ \- would be too leery of being seen by a worker. That wasn’t even getting into the way the scent of whale blood and innards inevitably soaked into the clothes and skin of people who spent their days in places like that.

 

There are a few buildings he hasn’t yet checked, initially seeing no sign of occupancy, so he doubles back. Halfway down the street, he gets lucky.

 

A stained mattress is tucked away near the door of this warehouse. It isn’t visible from the street or from the loft windows on either side. A rucksack is laid neatly on it. Corvo eyes it warily, and on further inspection is right to do so - there is a trap attached to it, probably imperceptible to anyone who doesn’t have the experience and nifty, if currently unreliable, supernatural powers that he does.

 

The final thing, the thing that clinches his determination that this is the one - more, that this is _Daud_ \- is the red coat tossed carelessly beside the bag. The same colour red as the coat Corvo remembers, a coat designed and dyed to hide the shed blood of both the wearer and his victims. It makes his heart beat double, and then triple when he hears a noise, the clatter of boots on concrete, and realises that the owner of the coat has returned.

  
He turns around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im sorry


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lot of Stuff in this chapter... next one will be a while longer coming bc i've been Off My Game the past few days and making slow progress but. its the gay chapter so im glad to be writing it. enjoy (& [come give me encouragement](http://aerynlallaboso.tumblr.com) lmao)

The person who may or not be Daud is shorter than he remembers. They wear a red coat, the twin of the one on the bed where they have presumably been sleeping, and a mask is fastened over their face. A whaler’s mask, like Daud’s assassins used to wear before he fled for his life and his killers went underground.

 

Corvo doesn’t move. The person in the red coat is regarding him through the large opaque eyeholes in their mask. He can see a sabre strung by their waist, and the outline of two more knives in their left boot and up one of their sleeves.

 

“You sent me a letter,” Corvo says.

 

They incline their head.

 

“Why?”

 

His answer is the smallest, subtlest twitching of his opponent’s fingers towards their sword, and so Corvo immediately abandons his questioning and unfolds his own knife. The person in the red coat Blinks, the air shivering briefly like it did when Jessamine was killed, when Daud Blinked away from their fight to beg for his life. It  _ must _ be him. Corvo Blinks too, towards the locked door of the warehouse, noting that the rucksack formerly on the mattress has disappeared. They’re undoubtedly better armed now.

 

A sound from behind him. Corvo dodges a knife thrust to his throat, slams the palm of his hand into their stomach and tries to grab a handful of coat. His wrist burns, suddenly, pain shooting through his arm, and the atmosphere of the warehouse turns cold. Another accidental time stop. It won’t affect his opponent.

 

They’re in front of him now. He swings purposefully with his own knife, manages a clean cut to their shoulder through the coat. The temporally-induced stillness shatters just as they strike back with a right hook, catching him a glancing blow to the chest and forcing him to dance away, pirouetting like a dancer and pulling his crossbow from his jacket. His first bolt misses - barely. His second hits, then clatters to the floor. They must be wearing armoured padding over their vital organs, and they’re gone again.

 

They can’t hide for long in a warehouse this open, he thinks, searching furiously for a glimpse of red. Noise echoes around him, some of it noise that can’t possibly be  _ there _ ; he hears the chittering of birds, the hiss of river krust, the clink of chains in Coldridge. Mixed underneath it is a slow torrent of whalesong that rings louder and louder and  _ louder- _

 

Corvo groans and covers his ears, but the noises won’t stop. It must be something - a  _ gift _ , the whalesong leaves him no doubt.

 

He wills his altered vision on just in time to see the yellow-gold figure leaping for him, turns on his heel, and shoves them to the ground with their arms behind their head, knife at their chin. He wrenches their sabre from them and kicks it away and hisses, “ _ Daud _ .”

 

“Not nearly,” the person says, eerily calm, and even with their voice distorted through the whaler’s mask, he can tell they’re not lying.

 

“Then who-”

 

They Blink. Corvo is up in an instant, preparing for another strike, but it doesn’t come. The person in the red coat retrieves their sabre, glances it over, and sheathes it. “You must be Corvo Attano,” they say. “Or should I call you the Masked Felon?”

 

“How about you tell me what to call you first?” Corvo says. He hasn’t put his knife away yet.

 

One hand comes up to the whaler’s mask, unfastening a strap that keeps it buckled. “I go by a few things. But since I’m back in Dunwall-” The mask loosens, falls into her hand, revealing dark skin and eyes and a hard, determined mouth. “You might as well call me Billie. It’s what  _ he _ calls me, anyway.”

 

“You mean-”

 

The woman before him drops her mask on the floor and slips the glove off her left hand, holding it out to show Corvo what he already knows is there. “I’ve been waiting for you to get here,” she says. “I knew you’d track the letter to me eventually.”

 

Corvo blinks. “You  _ wanted  _ me to find you?”

 

“You’re a hard man to see, Lord Protector. Especially when I’m still a wanted criminal here. You’d probably have killed me if I tried to get to you in Dunwall Tower by myself.”

 

“You could’ve sent me a less cryptic message,” he points out. “Asked to see me through one of my agents. You must know I’m the Royal Spymaster as well.”

 

“Sure,” Billie says. “What does it matter. You’re here, and I want to talk to you about our mutual friend with the black eyes and the situation he has brewing.” She stoops, picks up her mask and tucks it into a voluminous coat pocket. “He’s been asking you to do things for him. I’ve been finding information for him as well, since he says that whatever happens to him happens to me. To us.”

 

Corvo folds his arms. He considers, and then decides to remove his own mask. “Since you already know who I am,” he says to Billie.

 

“Daud spoke of you fairly often after he killed the Empress. Even more after you started going after the people who hired him. And-”

 

“Wait,” Corvo interrupts, his expression darkening. “You’re not Daud, but you  _ know  _ him?”

 

She looks at him as if he’s soft in the head for not figuring it out already. Perhaps he is.  _ The whaler mask. _ “I was his second-in-command. Once. A very long time ago. I haven’t seen him in years and I doubt he’d be charitable if I ever tried to meet him again.”

 

“So you don’t know where he is.”

 

“I didn’t say that.” Billie tilts her head. The movement reminds Corvo of the Outsider. “Though I don’t think he’s come to Dunwall, unlike the rest of us.”

 

“The rest of us? Are you talking about the Whalers?”

 

“You didn’t know?”

 

“Know  _ what _ ?”

 

“The Marked,” Billie says, and Corvo’s mouth goes dry. “Every single one of us is here, in this city. Unless they were unable to come by reason of infirmity or indisposal.” She seems to be thinking of someone specific when she says the last, with a hint of irony.

 

A deluge of frantic thoughts floods Corvo’s mind - questions, concerns for Emily’s safety because there are Outsider knows how many people with supernatural powers in his city right at this moment, people who could be rational and reasonable like Billie or mad and homicidal like the late Granny Rags. “Why in the Void are they all here?”

 

“Because the Outsider told them to come,” she says. “It’s strange that he didn’t mention it to you.”

 

He raises an eyebrow to that. “You’ve talked with him before. You know how vague and cryptic he is, how many secrets he keeps. Like your letter, in fact.”

 

“I thought it might be different for you. You’re his favourite,” Billie states, as if that’s some sort of well-known fact. “He claims he doesn’t play favourites, but he never misses the opportunity to talk about you. Obliquely. The Lord Protector of the Empress is one of my Marked, did you know, did you know?  _ He  _ knows how to give me a good show with the gifts I have bestowed upon him. I wouldn’t be surprised if every other Marked knows you’re one of them.”

 

Corvo tries to reply, and finds he can’t. The Outsider’s favourite? Then why did he leave him unvisited so long - but he supposes he knows the answer to that, and he knows now that the Outsider had one dark eye on him all that time. He isn’t sure how any of this makes him feel. “He doesn’t tell me anymore than you,” he says finally.

 

“Then I suppose you have no idea what the calamity is he keeps talking about. What’s coming that’s leeching his power and making ours act up.”

 

“No.”

 

Billie nods, frowns. “I do have a theory,” she starts to say, but before she can elaborate, the walls of the warehouse around them shudder and crack, and a grey sky opens up in between the fissures. A sucking noise sounds, and Billie is gone. Corvo turns, knowing this time exactly who he’ll find.

 

The Outsider looks unhappy. “Billie Lurk,” he declares. “I didn’t think she was so interested in attracting your attention, Corvo. She has always worked alone since she left Daud’s gang of assassins. She never wants to have her back stabbed like she stabbed his. There are many who would do so in revenge for the worker’s revolt she put down in Morley.”

 

“I never heard about a worker’s revolt in Morley,” Corvo says.

 

His god is floating a little closer to the ground today. His complexion is even paler, if that’s possible, and his dark hair looks oddly wet, as if he has just emerged from the ocean. “That’s because,” he says imperiously, “She did her job well. And in an entertaining way. I give my Mark sparingly, and I chose well with her. Daud had a good eye.”

 

Corvo is very, very sick of thinking about Daud. “What have you brought me here for today?”

 

“Thresh. The time of his ritual approaches.”

 

“Well, you’re going to have to tell me where he is. I haven’t had the time to ask my contacts to find him.”

 

“Very well,” the Outsider says. He looks disappointed for some reason. Well, screw him. Corvo can’t be everywhere at once. “Though I am not sure of his exact location. I am not omniscient.”

 

Now  _ that  _ is a surprising admission.

 

“And I see less and less every day.” He pauses, almost faltering. “Nonetheless. Thresh lives in a house in the Estate District, on the canal. He is rich enough to own the place and staff to maintain it, but keeps his company very close. His neighbours suspect he is a heretic; they are obviously correct. He pays considerable bribes to a member of the Abbey to avoid being investigated.”

 

“Which member of the Abbey? They must be quite high-ranking to afford to dismiss complaints from people in the Estate District.”

 

“Even he doesn’t know,” the Outsider says. “The time will come when he will discover that he is simply being blackmailed, and the Overseers’ sights will fasten on him. But tonight, his ritual will proceed unhindered. Except by you.”

 

He smiles, cold and toothless. “I look forward to your performance, Corvo.”

 

The warehouse’s walls reassert themselves in their proper places. Billie has disappeared while he was in the Void, and so too has her rucksack. He doesn’t think he’ll find her here again.

 

~

 

The house on the canal where Thresh lives is enormous, even by the standards of the Estate District. It is on the opposite side of the canal and a few blocks down from the Boyle Mansion, and Corvo realises, looking up at it from his position on the street, that he has never known who lived here. Thresh has been very successful in keeping his anonymity, it seems.

 

It was already dark when the Outsider released him from his visit. More proof that his limited command of time is fading. He did not go back to the tower - he already had all his gear and armaments - but made directly for the canal, walking maskless at street level and keeping his ears open to the passersby. Thresh’s unpopularity with his neighbours had worked to Corvo’s advantage; more than one person had whispered an aside about ‘the man who lives there, a heretic or so we all think’ as they passed Thresh’s mansion.

 

It is an old building, likely constructed during the reign of Jessamine’s father, and supremely ugly in its largeness, a squat square shape with stone and plaster walls. The front door is wooden and flanked by two white stone pillars of the sort in architectural fashion more than thirty years ago. Corvo wonders if this contributes to Thresh being persona non grata in this neighbourhood - not that taste is especially required here, only wealth, but it never hurts to have both.

 

There is besides the front way a back door and a servant’s entrance, and it is this last that he plans to enter by. A young woman let herself in there minutes earlier, dressed in black with her hair tied in a neat bun. She left it unlocked. All he has to do is open the door and slip in.

 

He takes a deep breath. A blood ritual, the Outsider said. The images those words conjure up are highly unpleasant, even for someone as experienced in blood and blasphemy as Corvo. He can’t waver here.

 

The door creaks quietly when he turns the handle. The servant’s entrance is shadowed, hidden in the early evening by the great bulk of the house blocking all light, so nobody will see him go in unless they are keeping close watch on it. Inside, a long corridor stretches, carpeted in an oppressively bright orange. It muffles Corvo’s already quiet footsteps, creeping down towards the end of the passage. He draws his knife from his coat and unfolds it at the ready.

 

The first door he comes to leads to a small, empty sitting room, shabbily arranged and visibly disused. The next room is occupied only by a large painting stood against the wall, and the next - Corvo hears sound before he can peer through the keyhole and Blinks back to the painting room, entering and flattening himself against the door.

 

“Never know what he’s doing down there,” a man says. His voice grows louder, drawing nearer. “Heresy, probably. At least he pays good.”

 

“Where are you going? The kitchen’s that way.” A woman, young and shrill. Could be the one he saw going into the house earlier.

 

The man grunts. “Hell. I always get turned around. Who lives alone somewhere like this if they’re  _ not  _ an Outsider worshipper or mad, I’d like to know.” The voices begin to fade again. “It’s like a fucking labyrinth.”

 

Their two figures move further away, illuminated bright yellow in Corvo’s altered vision and turning east. The way to the kitchen, if he needs to go there, but he shouldn’t. The man said  _ down _ . A cellar or a basement, then. People who do forbidden things are so often drawn to the underground, to dark holes that resemble graves or the dens of animals. He would know. That trip under Dunwall Tower is still fresh in his memory, and how many times has he tread the sewers in pursuit of a target or to escape unseen?

 

The man isn’t wrong about a labyrinth. Corvo exits the painting room and heads in the direction opposite the kitchen and quickly finds himself becoming disoriented, even with his vision active. None of the doors are marked; passages branch off and absurdly double back. The offensively coloured carpet remains a constant. He finally emerges at the front entrance, a high-ceilinged parlour that is not inviting to visitors in the slightest, and stops to take stock. He wishes he could’ve had time to dig plans of this place out of the archives.

 

Something buzzes at the back of his head. It’s a familiar pull, like a rune is nearby. He should’ve brought the Heart, but it is still locked in its box back in the tower, so he has to rely on that feeling to guide him. 

 

Yet another corridor leads off the parlour, towards the back of the house, and Corvo follows the hum past a glass-doored library to a set of stairs that descend downwards at a gentle slope, terminating in a heavy metal door engraved with the word ‘Cellar’. He tries the handle. It squeaks alarmingly, and is also locked tight. Corvo grimaces. He hopes he won’t have to look far for the key, but he has a feeling Thresh must keep this place well-secured.

 

Turning back to the parlour passage once more, he Blinks swiftly from door to door, checking each room and branching corridor until he discovers the winding spiral staircase that leads to the upper floors. The house has four; he knows that at least from counting windows on the outside.

 

It takes ten minutes to find Thresh’s bedroom. He abuses his Blink heavily, chugging an elixir when that familiar strain in his hand appears, wandering through a cavernous dining room with only one place set and another library with books crammed so tight the shelves look liable to collapse under their weight. Everywhere, the owner’s lack of taste is overwhelmingly visible; even furniture that might be stylish or at least pleasant on its own is arranged in such a way as to clash colours or designs with the piece next to it. Any of the Boyle women might have had a heart attack upon seeing this place, were they ever invited or deigned to accept. Their mansion is almost visible in the distance through the large window in Thresh’s room, on the fourth floor.

 

Corvo searches the drawers of Thresh’s desk with practiced swiftness. There are financial papers, notes on Outsider rituals - of course - but no key to the cellar, and none under the single bed shoved to one corner of the room. The walls are a dark, sickly green and do not contain a key-hook or any kind of artwork. A second exit leads to a tiny antechamber, tiled like an ensuite bathroom but not furnished like one. The only thing in it leaves Corvo momentarily transfixed - a statue of a whale the size of a hound, crudely carved from black stone with the sheen of glass. It is set on a plinth, and below it are Thresh’s offerings: bone charms, teeth, dried seaweed and dead river krust, fresh fruit and rotten rat carcasses and the skull of a dog.

 

Now Corvo understands why Thresh’s bedroom is so dusty despite being obviously in use. There’s no way he would allow anyone else up here, to chance the possibility of them seeing or smelling his own private shrine. Odd, though, that it is missing the usual trappings of purple fabric and oil lamps. Maybe that’s what he has locked down in the cellar.

 

The statue, though riveting, does not hold a key. Back to square one. He leaves his target’s bedroom and circles the fourth floor again, getting lost only once. Far below him, on the ground floor, the silhouettes of the two servants putter about in the kitchen. There does not seem to be anybody else in the house, although Corvo is fairly certain Thresh is here. It is almost unbelievable to him that one person could live in this vast amount of space - even Dunwall Tower is not only home to the Empress, but her Lord Protector, her servants, a small regiment of permanent guards and any number of visiting dignitaries and advisors.

 

The silhouettes on the ground floor exit the kitchen and take a circuitous route that Corvo suddenly realises will end at the cellar door. There is still no sign of the key, so he abandons his search and half-runs, half-Blinks down the staircase, reaching the library in the downstairs passageway just after the man and woman go by it. The woman is carrying a tray with something filthy-smelling on it; the man holds a decanter.

 

Corvo opens the library’s glass doors, just enough to obscure himself from view of the cellar, and it is then that Thresh finally makes his appearance.

 

He is a tall man, his face fleshy but not unattractive, like that of a scholar prone to fits of self-indulgence. His eyes are pale, his mouth sour, and he is clothed in a black suit and an air of impatience. “Where are the rest of you? Where is Davina?” he snaps.

 

The man says, “You dismissed all the rest of the servants for the night, sir, if you’d remember. It’s just me and Ellen.”

 

Thresh scowls at him. “Of course. Come along. No need to close the door,” he adds, for which Corvo is very grateful. “I should only have to unlock it for your way back up.”

 

Thresh’s servants exchange glances at each other behind his back, and follow him through the door. Corvo waits a good thirty seconds before Blinking behind them. He keeps low to the ground, listening to the three sets of footsteps ahead of him descending down stone steps covered in wet earth and rat droppings and matching his own to them. These stairs spiral like the ones in the house proper, and seem to go on forever, curling around themselves like the shell of a snail.

 

Finally, they are in the cellar itself. The lighting is dim - candles, and the familiar pale purple-white glow of whale oil lanterns. He can just make out empty wine racks lining the walls, a cheap wooden desk with an inkstand on it. The man and woman following Thresh are looking around curiously.

 

“Where d’you want this stuff?” the woman asks him. Thresh points, imperiously, at the desk. “What d’you want it  _ for _ , anyway, if you don’t mind me asking. Sir,” she adds belatedly. “It was hard to find. Fresh whale meat, with the whales dying-”

 

“You aren’t paid to talk,” Thresh says. “And you, the spirits can go over there as well.”

 

Both the servants unburden themselves of their loads and stand waiting expectantly. Thresh grimaces at them. “The two of you,” he says. “May drink.”

 

“Drink?” the man says, bewildered.

 

Two cups are produced from seemingly nowhere, glass goblets that Thresh proceeds to fill with the spirits in the decanter that the man brought down. “Drink,” he tells them. Orders them, really. The subterfuge - for it must be subterfuge, there must be something else in that decanter - is obvious to Corvo, but Thresh’s hired help do not apparently see any choice but to do as he asks. They drink.

 

Moments later, they are unconscious. Corvo presses back into the darkness of the stairwell, watching Thresh heft the man into his arms. The woman he leaves slumped over the desk. With one sweeping gesture, he tears down a huge, wide piece of black cloth strung from the ceiling that Corvo had not even noticed, revealing the cellar to be twice as large as its previous claustrophobic dimensions. More fabric, the expected purple, drapes the rest of the room, and graffiti is scrawled across the walls, barely visible in this light -  _ THE OUTSIDER WALKS AMONG US. _

 

Thresh lets the man’s body slump to the ground in front of his shrine. He turns, retrieves the tray of whale meat, and lays it on the shrine, placing his hands on the flesh and saying something Corvo cannot hear. Then he pulls a knife out of his pocket and, hoisting up his unconscious servant, carves deep gashes into his forearms and brings the limbs up to rest on the shrine.

 

Corvo clenches his fist. Time stops. He darts forward, relieved to note that the blood spilling from the servant’s arms has yet to splash onto the dark stone and barbed wire of the shrine’s centrepiece. Prying them out of Thresh’s grasp, he rolls up the man’s sleeves and duplicates the cuts Thresh just inflicted, thick slashes that will bleed well but not kill if treated soon.

 

He resumes his position at the foot of the staircase, and time begins to flow again. Thresh cries out in pain, turning on his heel. Corvo is alarmed by the fervour alight in his eyes.

 

“His wounds are transferred to me!” Thresh exclaims, rapt, staggering, bleeding. “The Outsider’s work - divine intervention-” He cuts off, pivots. His blood drips heavily on the whale meat, on the centrepiece, stains the purple fabric an ugly brown. “Outsider’s blood, be as my blood - Outsider’s whim, be as my whim - Outsider’s body, be as my body-”

 

Fire bursts from the spots where Thresh’s blood has fallen. Corvo starts. Thresh  _ howls _ , hisses through gritted teeth, “Outsider’s power, be as my power -  _ come to me _ -”

 

As sudden as the fire starts, it goes out. On the last word, Thresh’s eyes roll back into his head, and he falls forwards onto his shrine. His head lolls off the edge at an unnatural angle, but his chest still heaves. He is alive.

 

Corvo stares at the grotesque tableau before him - unconscious bodies, the rising coppery smell of fresh blood, the oily scent of the lamps lighting it and the fading odor of smoke. The ritual is complete, he supposes. He doesn’t know what this has accomplished at all, but he has done what the Outsider asked. That is how his life has been lived recently.

 

Before he leaves, he gathers up Thresh’s servants over his shoulders, wincing at the weight, and lugs them both up the stairs, closing the cellar door behind him and placing the both of them in chairs in the entrance parlour. He exits through the servant’s door, the same way he entered.

 

~

 

“Aidan Thresh,” the Outsider says, hovering over Corvo’s bed in his dreams. “He gave up his land and his title in return for the solace of cold, hard coin a long time ago, but he still lived amongst the nobility he abandoned. He carved that statue with his own two hands, you know. He would’ve given anything for me except his money. And now he lies at the foot of my shrine with the blood in his veins turning to poison.”

 

Corvo rolls over. “He’s… dying?”

 

“He is already dead,” the Outsider corrects. He is not hovering anymore. He sits, his body a real weight at the end of the bed. “That is the price of arrogance, of thinking you can contain me.  _ Threaten _ me. You heard his incantation. Blood to my blood, whim to my whim. As if a human could ever force me to appear before him.”

 

The silence he falls into after those words feels strange. Uncomfortably intimate, decides Corvo, who is only perhaps half-awake. “I don’t think I’m going to remember this in the morning,” he tells the Outsider.

 

The Outsider looks at him with an expression bordering on tenderness - a trick of his imagination, clearly - and says, “Go back to sleep, Corvo. I will tell you when I require your help again.”

 

~

 

Dawn finds Corvo cleaning his gear from the previous night’s misadventures. He did not sleep particularly well, though he knows he must have snatched an hour or two at some point. The Outsider’s image lingers in his thoughts; true to his word, he cannot recall anything coherent about the visit except that it happened.

 

His knife well-scrubbed of Thresh’s blood, Corvo folds it away into his jacket. A light breakfast was brought to him by a maid barely concealing a yawn not long earlier, and he ate while studying the finalised schedule for Emily’s upcoming celebrations. Her birthday is nine days away. This morning, they have a date on the practice grounds.

 

Despite his expectations of a knock on his door or an appearance at his window, she meets him on the way down the tower’s central staircase. “Good morning, father.”

 

“I know I’ve agreed, but it’s still a ways til the official announcement,” Corvo says mildly.

 

“I’m practicing,” Emily retorts. She is dressed ultra-practically, her black jacket and pants almost a mirror to his own. All she’s missing is the special-made knife and crossbow stashed on her person; in lieu, she has a finely tempered blade sheathed at her waist and has been hankering after a wrist-mounted bow ‘for emergencies’. “What shall we do today? Fencing? Or a duel with pistols? I’ve always thought it would be interesting to participate in one of those. Twenty paces, turn, draw - it must be very intense.”

 

Corvo, who has been in four pistol duels in his forty-seven years of life, says, “Very. But I don’t think the Watch would be confident enough in my aim to let me nearly shoot you.”

 

“Nearly is the word,” Emily says. She threads her arm through Corvo’s, and they descend the steps of the tower’s main entrance hall together. “Just fencing, then.”

 

“You could always shoot at targets.”

 

She concedes that she could. 

 

The sky outside is clear and wonderfully, refreshingly blue with hardly a cloud to mar it. A pair of guards greet them at the practice grounds and insist on checking every weapon Emily is to handle, likely hoping that their diligence will impress the Lord Protector. She shakes her head at the fuss, but thanks them when she is finally allowed to have her pistol and crossbow, smiling at Corvo. They pick a spot on the paved stretch and begin with the sword.

 

Emily has been studying sword forms from a number of different islands lately - and even beyond the Empire - and is attempting to put them into practice, but the gap between words on a page and an actual sword in her hand, as Corvo has often reminded her, is large. She grows frustrated easily when he knocks her blade away while she is in the middle of a flourishing swing that would decapitate an unarmed man. “You have so much more experience than me,” she laments.

 

“You’ve been learning the sword since you were thirteen,” Corvo says. “If you would put away the fancy maneuvers and fight dirtier, you might-”

 

His daughter lunges for him, her sword thrusting straight for his ribs. He swings up to block it, but the strike never reaches him. Instead, Emily drops her weapon, steps past him, and slips an arm around his neck and her other around the elbow of his sword arm. A textbook Tyvian chokehold.

 

“Dirty enough?”

 

Corvo smiles. “Good. You shouldn’t have dropped your blade though.”

 

He hears a thin scraping sound, and then Emily has a short knife at his collar. “I have another.”

 

“You really are my daughter,” he murmurs, and Emily laughs. She withdraws her knife and picks up her sword by the hilt, wiping it on her pants and stepping into a sword stance again. Corvo does the same.

 

A small crowd of guards has gathered to watch them by the time they are finished practicing, making noises of approval every time one of them lands a good blow. Emily has switched from her foreign techniques to good old-fashioned stabs and parries and it serves her very well; her face shines with a determination and concentration matched only by Corvo’s own. She’s come a long way from the girl who begged him to play hide and seek in the tower courtyard.

 

“Lord Protector! Empress!”

 

The call comes up as they sheathe their swords. A pale-faced man who Corvo recognises from trips up and down the water lock is running towards them, almost stumbling over his own feet. “The - in the lock - the Watch-”

 

“Steady on,” Emily says. “Slow down. What is it?”

 

More cries sound from the direction of the tower’s front courtyards, the direction of the water lock. “There’s a whale,” the man says, swallowing. “Dead, half-beached - crushed half one of our boats before just  _ dying _ . In the water lock.”

 

“A whale?  _ Here? _ But we’re so close to the city.”

 

One of the guards says darkly, “An ill omen,” and his fellows begin to agree. The Outsider’s name is not said, but Corvo knows they are all thinking it. “I want to see it,” he tells the man from the lock, who nods mutely and turns back.

 

“Should I go too?” Emily asks. She’s biting her lip, clearly not wanting to view the whale corpse dumped unceremoniously on her watery doorstep.

 

“No, it’s alright. Go and tell Sokolov; I’m sure he’ll want to see it before it’s cleared away. Which it will be as soon as possible.”

 

“You’re right.” Her expression is still worried, surveying her guardsmen chattering about superstition and strictures. “I hope this isn’t really an omen, like they’re saying. I shall have to convince them otherwise somehow, or the whole Watch will be living in fear of the Outsider coming down on their heads.”

 

“Tell them to recite their strictures twice before bed and they’ll be fine,” Corvo says dryly. Then, softer: “I’ll see you in a minute, Em.”

 

They stride off in opposite directions, Emily to the tower’s side entrance and Corvo to the front. The man from the lock - his name might be Burke, but Corvo isn’t entirely certain - keeps a strong pace ahead of him, passing under the square arch that leads to Dunwall Tower’s water lock. It is not filled at the moment, which is how the whale must’ve been able to get in, throwing itself onto an entering boat.

 

Corvo looks over the edge. The drop is quite long and the landing not soft, despite being water. He threw himself off here to escape after killing the Lord Regent eight years ago and he can still recall the sting of hitting the bottom, the brief moment of airlessness before his head broke the surface. If he were to jump now, though, he would be in quite a different state.

 

A mangled and broken boat, one of the Watch’s by the looks of it, is in the bottom of the lock. Like Burke told him, the whale’s body is half on top of it, the other half trailing off into the water. There are no visible wounds on the massive animal; it lies on its side, one glassy unseeing eye staring up at the spectators above.

 

“Was there anyone on it?” Corvo asks quietly.

 

“Five men,” a voice who is not a guard or Burke answers him. He half-turns, starting to see Billie Lurk beside him with no warning. “Two drowned. The rest climbed a chain that was lowered for them.”

 

“What are you doing here?” He would ask how she got here, but he knows of more than one route into the tower accessible by someone with the Outsider’s gifts. There hasn’t been a need to seal them until now.

 

Billie says, “I need to show you something. Now, if that’s possible.”

 

“It…” The Watch can handle the clean-up without him. “It is.”

 

A quiet, whooshing noise, and both of them are gone.

 

~

 

Billie leads him across the rooftops of Dunwall at high speed, Blinking with a quickness and agility that comes with years of practice. They both overshoot occasionally, Corvo nearly stepping through a skylight when his Mark flares too powerfully, and he hears whalesong and the creaking of a ship’s deck once when Billie stumbles. Although she has not said anything about her particular set of powers, he can guess what the phantom sounds are for: distraction, misdirection. Madness and deafening, perhaps, if used strongly.

 

The Old Banking District looms ahead; Corvo is not at all surprised when Billie keeps on going past the gates. Or rather, above them. They climb a wall, Blink up a drainpipe to run over top of a street of shopfronts, step down a level to reach a third floor balcony and then Blink up again. The most ruined part of the district is this way. Some places are even still semi-flooded despite years of drainage.

 

It is to one of these buildings that Billie appears to be taking him. She stops on the roof opposite it, pointing to its worn brick front. “Most of the back is caved in,” she informs Corvo. “There’s tunnels dug in the basement. That’s where we’re going.”

 

Underground again. He nods, following her through a smashed window and down a flight of stairs into one of the filthiest rooms he has ever seen. Muck is smeared on the walls, some of it in patterns or fragmented words. A rat nibbles a chunk of torn-up floorboard in the corner; a pile of them are stacked beside the large hole in the floor. Someone must’ve been digging for weeks to create this.

 

“It leads to the sewers.”

 

“Of course it does,” Corvo says. “After you.”

 

They descend into the tunnel. Billie brings out a small lantern from her coat to light the way, feeling along the walls with her other hand. The tunnel might be claustrophobic if it weren’t dark enough that Corvo can hardly see anything around them; he is simply tracing Billie’s footsteps. It occurs to him that this would be the perfect place for her to kill him, if she wanted to.  _ The Outsider wouldn’t let her _ , he thinks, and then ridicules himself for the notion. The Outsider doesn’t care. Probably.

 

_ You’re his favourite _ .

 

Light begins to reflect off the walls. They are no longer in an earthen passage, but the sewers proper, as the immediately familiar stench can attest. There is a grimy feeling to every movement he makes here, like the very air is sodden with human waste and nature’s natural refuse. Billie does not appear to care. “This way,” she says. “We’re nearly to them.”

 

“Them?” They turn down a passage that leads west, crouching under a metal barrier. She Blinks up to an overhead pipe and he follows suit.

 

“You’ll see,” Billie says, and then holds her finger up to her lips. Neither of them are masked, which Corvo assumes means they do not intend to be seen by whoever they’re hunting. There could be a number of different groups occupying a sewer room down here: criminals, runaways, homeless plague survivors with no money to go anywhere else.

 

And one more that he’s forgotten, but remembers upon Billie waving him to a halt at the entrance to their destination - Outsider cultists.

 

There are five of them. Four men, one woman, sitting in a circle before the biggest shrine Corvo has ever seen. Fabric is pinned all around the walls of this sewer clearing, trailing off where the pipes narrow into a corridor again rather than a room. Bone charms and runes are heaped at the foot of the shrine. One of the men looks to be carving another. All of the cultists look drained, sick, with dark hair cut short and unnaturally thin builds.

 

Billie whispers, “I found these people for him yesterday. He said the rituals they perform have the opposite effect to what they want, that they hide them from his sight instead of calling attention to them. Sounds like shit to me. He can’t see like he used to anymore.”

 

“Yes,” Corvo whispers back. “He told me. What would he want with them?”

 

“My theory about what’s going on with him,” Billie says. Like last time, she gets no further before she is interrupted, this time by a shout from below. One of the cultists has leapt up from their circle. He is clutching his left hand, babbling almost incoherently, his lips and lids drawn back in utter shock. The men on either side of him get up, and he lets go of his own hand.

 

On the back, there is a Mark.

 

The woman lets out a cry, too, and raises her newly Marked hand. One by one, each of the five people in the sewer room are Marked. The Outsider’s symbol ripples into being on their hands in gold and black, and they get down on their knees and bow before their shrine, kissing bone charms and calling to the Outsider, thanking him for their newfound power. Corvo feels like he is about to be sick.

 

“He told me,” he hisses at Billie. “He gives his Mark sparingly - why would he do this? He’s never taken any notice of his most fervent worshippers before.”

 

“He’s desperate,” she answers. Her lips are a straight, set line. “He’s stretching himself thin. He needs more people to do things for him or collect for him or - to bear the weight, maybe. Because-”

 

A buzzing sound begins to drum through the air. A fly fizzes past them, then another, then a tiny swarm of black blowflies, coming from somewhere in the sewers. Billie flattens herself against the wall to avoid them; Corvo stares along their flight path, towards one of the men kneeling at the shrine. Tears paint his cheeks. A fly lands in one of his tear tracks.

 

Corvo’s hand strains incredibly. His Mark flares wild; he doubles over in pain, his eyeballs aching. The world has turned vibrant purple and gold, his altered vision kicking in without him wanting it again. He hears Billie make an odd groan beside him. Her silhouette is grasping her left hand, and then there are  _ screams _ from the cultists, their golden figures writhing. The sound of flies gets louder. A bubbling sound, a hissing like acid accompanies it.

 

One of the golden silhouettes disappears. Corvo tries to turn his vision off, to see properly. It won’t comply. All he can see is the people below him dying like shadows flickering and vanishing on a wall, their Marked powers burning through their unprepared bodies. Kindling to flame, fresh meat to a hound-

 

The screams stop. He blinks. He had not realised his eyelids were screwed so tightly shut, against the vision. Not that it made a difference.

 

Below them, in the sewer room, there are now five corpses. Blowflies cluster so strong on the body of one of the men that there will soon be nothing left of him. There already is nothing left of the woman. Green liquid, like krust spit, bites through the floor beneath her remains, pooling towards the other carcasses. One is semi-transparent, the grime of the ground visible through his skin and bone and vital parts. Bile rises again in Corvo’s throat.

 

“Bearing the weight,” Billie says viciously. “He’s  _ dying _ .”

 

_ He can’t die. He is a  _ god, he wants to say. But he believes her.

 

The floor starts to waver, to flicker, and Corvo feels himself dropping from his perch on the pipe. At first he thinks he is fainting, slipping into unconsciousness, but then he sees Billie falling too. The sewer’s walls rise up and break apart; the grey expanse of the Void fills their vision. It is never a truly pleasant place to be. Right now, though, it feels more alien than anything Corvo has ever experienced, more terrifying than everything he just saw. A bitter wind drags on his bones.

 

“Are you here to explain yourself?” he shouts into it. Billie is tense beside him, hands twitching for a weapon.

 

“I shouldn’t have to explain myself to you.” The Outsider’s voice comes from nowhere, like the wind has already eroded him away completely, turning his marble flesh to sand. “But you have already discerned all that I could possibly say.”

 

“You’re-”

 

He appears, finally. He looks furious; his black eyes swirl like the abyss. “I am dying, yes. The waves coming to sweep the Void are intended to sweep me away. To cleanse the space of my presence and pretend I was never here.”

 

For the longest moment, Corvo is speechless. Billie asks, “Why?”

 

“Because the Void has decided it.” The Outsider folds his arms. “My time - this era - is ending. In sixty years, the whales will all be dead. Emily Kaldwin’s daughter will rename this city, and the Overseers will be nothing more than a brief chapter in the history books. They won’t need their devil anymore. I am no longer-” He bites off the word, his expression a mask of rage and impotence. He is the vengeful, malicious god that the Abbey paints him as in that second.

 

“Necessary,” Billie finishes for him.

 

The blank, aloof half-smile returns. “Yes.”

 

“Sixty years is a long time,” Corvo says, finding his voice.  _ Emily’s daughter _ \- but he cannot dwell on that right now, not when the otherworldly being that disappeared from his life for two years, the god who simultaneously repels and attracts him, is perhaps about to disappear for good.

 

“It is merely the blink of an eye for me, Corvo. The Void’s as well. You should know this by now.”

 

“Then what happens to  _ us _ ?” Billie demands. Her hand is still by her coat pocket. “You said that whatever happens to you, happens to us. All of your Marked. Are you telling me we’re all about to die when this wave hits?”

 

The Outsider purses his lips, tilts his head. “That,” he says. “Was a lie.”

 

This time, Billie is the speechless one. Corvo thinks she would run at the Outsider if she could, pull her knife out and slice clean across his long white neck. He might even let her. But there would be no point. The Outsider cannot be killed by knives or swords or bombs. He can only be killed, it seems, by the alien manipulations of the expanse around them.

 

“Nothing would happen to any of you if I ceased to be,” the Outsider continues. “You would lose your powers, of course. They do form a connection between all of you and me, but not a lethal one. The reason I told you otherwise was so that you would help me in my information-gathering. I knew Corvo would come to my aid without the added motivation-” Corvo’s hackles rise at his presumption, no matter how true- “But you, Billie Lurk. You are perhaps the most selfish person I have ever Marked. Magnificently so.”

 

“You son of a  _ bitch _ ,” Billie says to the Void’s god. “What was all of this for, anyway? Why are you having us collect things, perform rituals, Mark half-a-dozen fools at a time?” She thrusts her Marked hand at him. “It wasn’t to stem the tide, or your gifts wouldn’t keep going off like fucking fireworks.”   
  


The Outsider smiles, baring his teeth. They have given up all pretence of being human; they are sharp and conical, like a whale’s. “I said I was dying, but I never said I intended to go quietly. There are still things I need you to do for me.” He fixes both of them with his deep stare. “You’ll be hearing from me again very soon.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ty Again for the kind comments last chapter! this chapter was intended to be a lot longer but since i'm moving so slowly rn i started to consider splitting it and then realised this is already... 7.2k... so... i apologise that it's not as gay as it could be. im mad @ myself for turning this ship fic w plot into a plot fic w ship but i love dishonored's universe too much not to go wild w it... thanks for bearing w me and hopefully i can get some momentum back on the next chapter !

“Corvo, stop fussing.”

 

“Are you sure you gave Limt the right measurements? It’s very tight around the arms. If I can’t reach my blade in time-”

 

“It’s tight because you’re so tense! You look fine, father. You look wonderful. It’s all going to be fine.”

 

Emily smiles. It does nothing to dispel the prickling of his nerves. “Everyone who’s going to be in that room already knows you, respects your abilities. Half of them suspect anyway,” she says. “And I’m eighteen, so they can’t say anything.”

 

“They will,” Corvo reminds her, fiddling with his new vest. It won’t sit right, dragging on his scars underneath. “I don’t have a real claim to the throne anymore, but this will still acknowledge me as-”

 

“Mother’s lover, I know. People  _ know _ she had one. Otherwise how would I, their Empress, be here? They’ll talk for a week at most.” She smiles again, sadder. “She loved you, father. It’s what she would’ve wanted. I believe that.”

 

Emily turns eighteen today. She is dressed in black and a bright blue that reminds him of what the Void used to be like. She wears a ring on her finger and her hair like Jessamine used to and she has never looked more like an Empress. “She would’ve been proud of you, you know,” he tells her.

 

“I still have a lot to learn,” she demurs, but her cheeks glow with a happy flush. “Shall we go downstairs? The court awaits.”

 

An escort awaits past Emily’s bedroom doors as well, and maids to brush imaginary dust off her exquisitely tailored outfit. “How was the party last night?”

 

She waves off the maids. “You would know if you’d been there like you were supposed to be, Corvo. Where were you, anyway? Lord Protector business?”

 

Their private code for ‘stopping an assassination attempt’. “Something like that,” Corvo says as they set off. The wide corridors of Dunwall Tower are full of people today, scurrying about in a mad rush, preparing for the festivities. There is a ball tonight, a parade tomorrow, and another party in a few days time. He isn’t looking forward to any of it.

 

In truth, last night he had been at the party, for a good ten minutes. Then he’d been out on Dunwall’s rooftops meeting Billie Lurk.Several days have come and gone since the Outsider told them both he has a plan to - well, the specifics have somehow kept themselves out of the conversations he has held with Billie. ‘Defy death’ is the implication.

 

He has again said nothing to Corvo. Billie, who is still furious and has booked passage to a ship back to Morley in a week, reported that he asked after him regardless. He can see next to nothing now, forced to rely on his more co-operative Marked to feed him information. Some might say the death of his omniscience - if he was ever omniscient in the first place - marks the death of his godhood without him passing from existence, but those people have never met the Outsider, never breathed in the inhumanity of his presence.

 

Billie did not say why she continued to be a pair of eyes for the Outsider. Corvo doesn’t know her well enough to know, but if he had to guess from the way she spoke of the things he asked her to do, it would be because she enjoys it. The powers, the  _ purpose _ . She likes killing the rich and toppling the unworthy; no wonder she was Marked. He will feel better when she is out of the city.

 

Today, he has other worries.

 

The room in which the Empress holds court is crowded, even by usual standards. It is a large hall of white stone, unlike the wooden panelling that lines most of the inner rooms, giving it an ambience of light and air and a not insignificant amount of pompousness. The walls are hung with banners and were designed in their construction to create an echo, allowing the man or woman sitting on the central throne to speak and be heard without other amplification. A microphone has been set up beside the throne anyway, just in case.

 

Corvo and Emily and their escort enter through a discreetly set door, hidden behind the raised dais on which her throne sits. There are no other chairs in the hall; many nobles have lately raised quavering protests at this, but Emily has refused them all. She once said to Corvo, sweetly, that she likes to keep them on their toes.

 

With the Empress seated, court proceeds. The only things raised by those who come forward today are birthday wishes, thankfully, which Emily accepts gracefully. The two Lady Boyles are there, and a Pendleton cousin currying goodwill. He has been preparing to ask a pardon which Corvo knows Emily will never give while the Golden Cat still stands.

 

“Did you hear about that  _ man _ ? Found dead in his own cellar, on his own heretic’s shrine. I always had my doubts about him,” a woman whispers somewhere in the crowd. Thresh’s body was burnt by the Overseers after it was discovered by his clueless servants. His house will be repossessed, likely demolished.

 

Yet another man strides the plushly carpeted distance to the throne, bowing deeply. “Your Imperial Majesty,” he says. “The Crawfords wish you many happy returns of the day, and I beg a boon for myself, if Your Grace will permit it.”

 

“What kind of boon?” Emily asks, her eyebrow raised.

 

“To kiss your hand, Your Imperial Majesty.”

 

Emily’s eyebrows rise higher. Corvo stifles the urge to roll his eyes, or groan, or punch the young Lord Crawford in the face. At least he  _ is _ young - perhaps twenty-five at most. The possibility that his daughter might find him handsome might exist.

 

Emily says, with her most Imperial smile and her most Imperially dismissive voice, “I’m afraid I must decline,” and the possibility is snuffed out along with Crawford’s ingratiating smile. “Thank you for your wishes, and do tell your sister I enjoyed the volume of poetry she sent me very much.”

 

Crawford leaves, and Emily turns aside to whisper in Corvo’s ear, “If they’d sent Cynthia, I might’ve been more inclined to grant that boon, too.”

 

Belatedly, Corvo remembers the other young Crawford, a woman of twenty as handsome as her brother and who he had thought might be a good friend for Emily, and smothers a laugh.

 

Court continues. There are not many more supplicants - letters and cards and gifts have poured in from the people who cannot be present in person for whatever reason - so very soon the herald is calling “No more, Your Majesty,” and Emily is saying, “If that’s all, I have an announcement to make to all in attendance.”

 

The murmurs of noble gossip swell briefly, then quiet into silence. Everyone is waiting to hear what Emily has to say. Corvo’s feet hurt; he shifts from side to side, antsy. He has never felt at home in this room, never felt safe. There is no time when Emily is more vulnerable than when she is holding court. Any of the nobles here could be potential assassins, and he is still keenly aware that there are Marked besides Billie and himself in the city.

 

“Today, I am eighteen. My mother, Empress Jessamine, has been gone eight years, and the pain is still as fresh as if I saw her killed yesterday. I am not alone in the world, but sometimes I feel it, sitting before all of you.” Emily pauses, for effect. She is determined to make a spectacle of this for reasons Corvo can almost understand - if you’re going to throw a bomb into the midst of Dunwall’s upper class, you might as well pack it with as much gunpowder as you can find. “It is for this reason that I have decided to introduce to the court a very important person to my heart, a member of my family who comes forward not for closeness to the throne, like those who usurped it after my mother’s death, but at my request.”

 

He can  _ feel _ the shock run through the nobles assembled in the hall, see eyes widen and jaws loosen in preparation for dropping. Everyone there who does not know is wondering who the Empress is referring to - a relative? A previously unheard-of Kaldwin, or someone from the  _ other _ side of her family? What will this mean for them and their coffers?

 

“My father,” Emily says, and somebody gasps openly. She continues smoothly, like she heard nothing: “And my Lord Protector. Corvo Attano.”

 

On cue, Corvo steps forward from his place at Emily’s side and bows to the court, a shallow gesture more akin to a nod of the head. The reaction is more subdued than he expected, but there are still more gasps, slack jaws covered with limp hands, a few knowing looks. Bets will be settled tonight, he thinks wryly, and then stiffens. His Mark is tensing on the back of his hand, the muscles knotting in pain.  _ Not now- _

 

“Court is ended for the day,” the herald shouts. He of everyone there looks quite nonplussed. “Please leave the hall in an orderly fashion and make sure you have all your belongings with you. The Empress’s household is not financially responsible for anything you may lose while you’re here.”

 

Talk resumes immediately. People whisper and murmur and raise their voices to be heard above the hum of the crowd, all undoubtedly talking about him. Backward glances are cast at Corvo, some secretive and some very open stares, and Corvo tries not to notice because he is concentrating on willing his Mark into silence. The faintest gold-green glow is visible through his leather glove; he covers it with his other hand and grits his teeth.

 

At his side, Emily dismounts her throne gracefully, waving at her Imperial subjects. “I hope you will all be gentle on my father,” she says to the rapidly departing crowd, and then more quietly to Corvo, “I think that went well, don’t you?” She notes his hand-clutching and gives him a quizzical look. “Are you alright?”

 

His hand is screaming. “We’ll see tonight,” he says. “And I’m fine.” The Mark flares even stronger. “I’m  _ fine _ , Outsider’s c-”

 

As if on purpose to cut off his unthinkingly rude curse, the Mark sputters out, ache fading immediately with it. Corvo unclenches his hands and sighs.

 

“I suppose we will,” Emily says, her eyes narrowed.

 

~

 

A new, thicker pair of gloves is laid on his desk when he returns from security meetings that evening, along with a note: “Wear these with the new tunic, alright? I think they’ll go well. - EE”

 

“I’m supposed to be the one giving you presents, Empress Emily,” Corvo says to the note. He is not ungrateful for the gift, though. They are comfortable and will probably hide the glow if something happens again. He hopes not. He hopes that the pains in his hand aren’t a sign that more of the Outsider is being stripped away.

 

Tonight is not something that Corvo can say he has been looking forward to. The dinner at the Hound Pits two weeks ago - it feels longer, with all that’s happened - may have been uncomfortable, but at least it wasn’t a ball with  _ dancing  _ and a boatload of people who are most assuredly eager to quiz him about his new fame as the Empress’s father. He wouldn’t have gone for anything if the proposal by the Boyles to host it at their mansion had been approved, that’s for sure.

 

He pulls on the gloves and carefully folds the note up, slipping it into one of his drawers. Emily will already be downstairs. That probably makes him late, but he doesn’t mind lingering a few extra minutes to keep away from the rich prowlers downstairs. Yellow figures dot the edges of the vision when he switches it on; there are so many it resembles looking into the sun. Corvo squints.

 

There’s Emily, conversing with a small group of people on the edges of the party. Other silhouettes swirl and dance around her and pass her by, but he’d know her anywhere. He adjusts his trajectory down the stairs when she leaves her group, moving from room to room to check on her guests, and finds his place at her side in the music room.

 

“Can you play?” Lady Horace is asking her, staring with undisguised envy at the piano that occupies the room, carved bone keys shining pearly-white.

 

“My mother could, and I took lessons, but I’m afraid I lack the aptitude,” Emily says. She greets Corvo with a smile and a nod before turning back to Lady Horace, whose attention has quite shifted.

 

“Lord Protector! How nice of you to join us.” The woman is almost preening. Isn’t she married? “I was  _ shocked _ to hear the Empress’s news today, but really, it does make sense, doesn’t it? A devoted father protecting his daughter - you are a most admirable man, Corvo.”

 

Emily’s face brightens with mirth. “Thank you, Lady Horace,” Corvo says.

 

“Oh, please, call me Dahlia.”

 

“Dahlia,” Emily interrupts. “Have you tried the hagfish egg stew? I know it’s not the fashion, but I really prefer it to eating them raw or boiled.”

 

Corvo, who acquired a taste for raw hagfish eggs during Jessamine’s reign and will be somewhat sad to see them go out of style, says, “You prefer everything stewed.”

 

“I do! It’s so lovely to have everything melt apart in your mouth, all warm and soft. And the combination of flavours is heavenly. It’s the only way to eat in winter, I say.”

 

“I have tried it and it is pleasant,” Lady Horace says primly. “If… rustic.”

 

“I grew accustomed to rustic cuisine during my confinement eight years ago,” Emily says, entirely straight-faced.

 

Lady Horace drifts away after that comment, obviously disquieted by the cheery reference to the former Lord Regent’s reign, and Corvo accompanies Emily out of the music room. There is surely a more sophisticated term for the place, but that’s what he has always called it - the room where Jessamine tinkled out a melody when she was very, very bored, sometimes with him playing along on the nearest thing with strings. Neither of them had been particularly good, but it was fun all the same.

 

“Thank you for the gloves,” he says. They are walking close together, perhaps unconsciously because of the announcement. They are allowed to be close, allowed to be mistaken for a father and daughter because that is what they  _ are _ . Corvo finds himself glad that he agreed, for all the gossip it might rake up.

 

Emily snags an apricot tartlet from a servant’s tray as she passes. “You’re welcome. I thought they might help with the glow.” She takes a delicate bite, avoiding crumbs cascading onto her outfit with the precision of a wounded man avoiding krust spit. Her voice lowers almost to a whisper. “Won’t you tell me what’s happening with it, Corvo? You can be vague if you like. It’s obvious there’s  _ something _ going on with your hand and - you-know-who and I’m worried.”

 

Two men walk by them, one casting an askew glance at Corvo. Payneham? Perry? Something that starts with ‘P’ that isn’t Pendleton. He should know the names of every noble here, but he is distracted. “Should we be talking about this right now?”

 

“You never want to talk to me about this, no matter where we are. But you should. At least tell me if you’re about to drop dead in the middle of my birthday party.”

 

“That would cause a stir,” Corvo mutters. He reaches out and takes Emily’s hand briefly, squeezing it through his thick gloves and dropping it again. “I’m not going to drop dead. Although I can’t say the same for… you-know-who.”

 

Her mouth twitches almost imperceptibly. Carefully contained in the middle of a crowd, as always. “Are you saying he’s  _ ill _ ? What does that even mean for something like him? I mean - I’ve never even met him, he isn’t even supposed to be real. Just the thing the Overseers use to bash us all over the head with the Strictures.”

 

“He’s real, alright. Real and dying and I don’t know what it means for any of us.”

 

“The  _ whales _ ,” Emily says. “Sokolov was  _ right _ .” She turns her head to peer through the doorway to their right, the one that leads into one of the tower’s nameless but nonetheless exquisitely well-furnished rooms. “That reminds me. I think he was looking for you earlier. He’s probably where the drink is.”

 

“Probably.” They have stopped for a moment, too caught up in their conversation to navigate the hordes of people drifting through the tower. Corvo can smell food, the heady scent of alcohol and expensive perfume mixing together into something truly intoxicating - possibly toxic, too - and the incongruous stench of river-water. He glances down, afraid he’s tracked something in on his boots, but they look perfectly clean. Is the tower about to flood?

 

Emily pats his arm. “I should go speak with that Pendleton cousin,” she says. “You find Sokolov. I’m not eager to go near the drinks table since my last encounter with whiskey.”

 

“Of course,” he replies, frowning, trying to determine where that smell is coming from. When he refocuses, his daughter has disappeared around a corner. The source eludes him - it isn’t the floor, isn’t his boots, isn’t the rats. There shouldn’t be rats in the tower tonight, but there are. There are always rats.

 

Corvo sets off in the opposite direction to Emily, towards where Sokolov might be. For this party, the tower cellars have been raided and the drink fountains are flowing with wine of a decent vintage in honour of the Empress. There won’t be a drop of alcohol left in the whole place by tomorrow at the rate the people loitering by the table are drinking. One of them, he notes, is a fairly wealthy winemaker from another isle, he’s not certain which. The man must not sample his own wares often enough.

 

None of the people drinking are Sokolov, unfortunately. Corvo gets himself a glass of wine and stands watch, flicking his altered vision on and off to keep track of Emily’s movements. She is making a circuit of the tower’s lower floors at the moment. She spends just the right amount of time with every guest, smiling and making pleasant small talk, refusing courtly light touches from the younger lords. Even not so long ago as Jessamine’s father’s day, that sort of thing would’ve been punishable by having a finger lopped off. Ah, the modern era. He shakes his head and takes a gulp of wine.

 

Sokolov finally shows himself on Corvo’s ill-advised third glass. His thick beard is unmistakable amongst the clean- or half-shaven nobles, his build oddly tall and sturdy but his posture that of a man who spends his days hunched over a palette or microscope or book. His Tyvian heritage showing through, perhaps. Corvo has long known Sokolov’s hatred of the rich amongst whom he finds his patronage; he suspects the man’s love of expensive things outweighs it, a theory weighted towards by the fact that Sokolov makes a beeline directly for the priciest alcohol being dispensed.

 

“King Street - no? Well, I suppose this will do,” he hears him grumbling. “You haven’t seen the Lord Protector, have you?”

 

The woman on duty points with one hand while pouring Sokolov’s drink with the other.

 

“Ah, Corvo, there you are. I wanted to discuss the portrait that the Empress is having me paint of the two of you. You couldn’t spare a few hours from your duties tomorrow to stand for me, could you? I won’t need you there at the same time if it can’t be arranged.” Sokolov takes his glass without a thank you and drinks, grimacing at the taste. “It would be better, but I can make do with imagination. And have you heard anything else about the whales? The one that beached itself in the water lock was fascinating. I had a sample from its corpse sent to my laboratory for examination.”

 

“Not the whole thing?” Corvo asks.

 

Sokolov’s already beady eyes narrow at him. “I don’t have the room for that kind of thing and you know it. Maybe I’ll visit one of the slaughterhouses again. Barbaric places, but they do have a lot of space to conduct experiments in.”

 

A group of young, attractive and well-dressed women wander towards the drinks table, and Sokolov’s gaze wanders towards them. “I’ll see what I can do about taking time off,” Corvo says, entirely aware that he’s now only half listening. “If it’s only a few hours.”

 

“Hmm? Yes, well…”

 

One of the women shifts to mouth words into another’s ear. Corvo spies Emily behind her; her circle of the ground floor must be complete. He raises a hand and she strides over to them with a smile ready.

 

That odd smell of river water reaches Corvo’s nose again. He squints, sniffs, and notices that the woman who just whispered to her companion is no longer wearing a white shirt with gold trim and is quite a degree shorter. She is a hooded figure in a black tunic trimmed with filth, her face hidden and her fingers grasping, arthritic, and holding a knife and Emily is nearly at his side-

 

Corvo shouts. The hooded woman leaps forward with a shriek that puts him in mind of a wounded animal, her weapon slashing for his throat. It finds his blade instead - he struggles against her unnatural strength for a second before pushing her back, swiping the knife out of her hands. Guards are already running to seize her. Sokolov has dropped his brandy.

 

The woman gnashes her teeth and wails, howls as three members of the tower guard pull her arms behind her back. One tries to remove her hood. She bites him, and continues yelling incoherently - party guests are taking notice, moving away in fear.

 

“Who are you?” Corvo demands. He can feel Emily hovering near him, cold rage equal to his own. This woman just got past all the security measures planned for the Empress’s party and tried to kill him. “You-”

 

He chokes on nothing. There is a hand around his throat, but not. An invisible force is crushing his throat, robbing him of breath.

 

“Father!”

 

The woman is laughing, her fingers twitching and scratching at the air. He can feel the gouges on his own neck. His blood is pumping in his veins, his heart thudding so hard he can feel it in every cell in his body.  _ Magic _ -

 

_ All of the Marked are here in Dunwall. _

 

There is a scream, and suddenly he can breathe again. The hooded woman curses loud and crude and Corvo, gasping, sees the thin blade stuck straight through the Mark on her left hand, the blade held by Emily. “Witch,” the Empress of the Isles, his daughter says.

 

“Bitch,” the hooded woman retorts. It is her first intelligible word yet, delivered in the screeching rasp of an old hag who spends her days reciting arcane chants. The guards holding her are looking nervous, probably because of her use of magic just moments ago. For once in his life Corvo wishes he’d asked properly outfitted Overseers to attend this party.

 

The woman directs her attention to him again. “Favourite,” she says, croons. “Corvo Attano. It’s good to meet you.”

 

“Should we take her to the cells, my lord?” one of the guards asks, shaky.

 

“I came here so you could kill me,” the woman says to Corvo. Her right hand is wringing, wriggling in her captor's grasp. Her left is still held stationary by Emily’s knife. “A good death. I’ve lived longer than I should, but I had to do what he said.  _ He _ . You’re the one he likes best. Thought you would give me a show like you give him. Slash my throat like he said you did to those others.”

 

“If you want someone to kill you, I’ll do it myself,” Emily says, suddenly and frighteningly vicious. She withdraws her blade from the woman’s hand with one swift motion and brings it to the witch’s neck. “How dare you break into my home, on my birthday, and try to murder  _ my father _ ? How dare you?”

 

People are staring at them, nobles and servants all. Some of the party guests have already fled for safer rooms, perhaps some all the way back to the water lock, and more guards are joining the crowd from other rooms. The revelation of the Empress’s father and an assassination attempt in one day - this week will not be a slow one for gossip.

 

The woman hisses quietly at Emily. Her head cranes down, looking at the knife, then back up. Her face is still hidden from view. “Father? You’re his daughter?” She pauses, then laughs. “That would be fine, then. Favourite’s blood still runs in you. He thinks you’re interesting, too. Not like your father, but you’ll be a good show one day.”

 

“Empress,” a guard says. “What do you want us to do with her?”

 

“Emily,” Corvo says. He can hear breathlessness in his own voice. “Send her to Coldridge. She’ll be no threat with her M- her witchcraft taken care of, and you’ll scare your guests if you kill her right here.”

 

Although he isn’t sure if that might not be a good thing. Letting the nobles see the edge to their Empress, letting them know that she won’t hesitate to put down anyone who threatens her or her own even if she has to do it alone. Let them know she won’t die like her mother did. He can almost hear her thinking it.

 

Emily blinks once, twice. She retracts her blade. “You’re right. It would be hard to get the blood out of the carpet. Take her to the cells, guardsmen.”

 

“Yes, Empress,” the three guards say in scattered unison. The one on the witch’s left tightens his grip on her arm, pulling her back to head for the side door to the back courtyard, and then lets out a yell. He drops her arm. His own hangs limp and loose like it has just been crushed in a vice.

 

The witch brings up her left hand - her Mark is stuttering with golden power, even with a gash dripping blood right through its centre. “ _ I won’t rot! _ ”

 

Quick as a flash, Emily’s knife is back up. A party guest gasps; another shrieks.

 

With her hood flown back, the witch’s face is repulsively old, her features almost indistinguishable from the coven of wrinkles that slice through them, and the lifeblood leaving her throat spatters across her eyes. She grins; her teeth are perfect, with the pearly sheen of whalebone. “Thank you,” she says.

 

There is a moment of complete silence while she dies. The nobles around them are horrified or fascinated or both at once. The young woman who the witch had whispered to is breathing long, quiet sobs.

 

Corvo says, “Emily.”

 

The Empress looks from her blood-soaked knife to the body of the witch she just killed to the crimson pattern splayed across her tunic. She has never looked more like him, and yet he cannot help seeing Jessamine as she died, her life fading from her at the whim of Daud’s blade. She wipes her blade on her clothing. Then she turns, without a word, and leaves, her party guests parting like the witch’s flesh before her.

 

Corvo watches her go upstairs, heading for her chambers in his altered vision. “Clear the body out of here,” he says. “And the guests, too. I think tonight is over.”

 

“Wait, wait!”

 

He has forgotten who was beside him before the witch appeared, who is now pressing forward to the corpse of a Marked with excitement bursting from every orifice. Sokolov wrenches up the dead witch’s hand. “Corvo - this tattoo - I’ve seen it before, somewhere… Please, if you would bring the body to my laboratory first. The Outsider’s work-”

 

The old man is so obsessed he is willing to mention the Outsider metres away from an Overseer, in a volume easily overheard, and the three glasses of wine Corvo has drunk this evening are rushing to his head. “Sokolov,” he says, lowering his voice to a murmur. “If you  _ really _ want to summon the Outsider, try playing hard to get for five  _ fucking _ minutes.”

 

Sokolov stares at him, dumbstruck.

 

“Get her out of here,” Corvo says to the guards, and leaves to find his daughter.

 

~

 

He does not see her again that night. Callista greets him at the door to her chambers and tells him that Emily has locked herself in and does not wish to talk to anyone. She took food and clean clothes at least, and her red-stained ones are piled neatly outside her door. He considers briefly Blinking around to her window and climbing in, but decides that leaving her alone might be best. For now.

 

The corpse of Emily’s first kill has been burnt in the tower’s furnaces, Sokolov be damned, and Corvo has questioned the women who were with her at the party. None of them noticed anything out of the ordinary - the witch, the Marked must have possessed some kind of transformation power, able to cloak herself in the image of a richer, younger person. They left exhausted, taking the last boat filled with guests down the water lock.

 

His bedroom is dark and cold when he returns to it. It must be at least three in the morning, though most of the tower’s lights are still on. Servants are working to restore a semblance of order to the tower before they turn in; the bigger cleaning jobs will be left til morning, but the food and drink must be cleared away, and blood scrubbed off the carpet. It may have to be replaced.

 

Corvo groans. He sheds his new clothes and dresses in a more comfortable bedshirt and pants. To his grim surprise, there are muddy fingermarks on the collar of his tunic from the witch’s phantom hands, long and thin and smelling of river water. He folds the fabric over them, wonders where the witch came from. If she lived here in Dunwall for her many long years, or if she traveled from somewhere else.

 

“She hailed from Gristol, but not from Dunwall,” someone says.  _ Someone _ \- he knows who it is. “Your old friend Granny Rags would never have tolerated another old woman of her power in this city. She wanted me all to herself.”

 

Corvo wishes he had lit a fire or a lamp before changing. The faint moonlight outside his window barely illuminates the Outsider’s cheekbones, and yet he has no doubt that the god can see him in full detail. He feels, as always, at a disadvantage. “You knew she was going to come here tonight?”

 

He is standing on his feet, not hovering. The dark gives him enough of a mysterious air that it would hardly be noticeable if not for the sudden small drop in his height. “No. I hadn’t spoken to her since I invited her to Dunwall. She needed no extra encouragement.”

 

“Like Billie, you mean.”

 

“Like Billie.” The Outsider folds himself in half and sits on the end of Corvo’s bed, like that half-remembered dream from days ago. His gall, his obvious comfort in draping himself over his surroundings like they are in the Void when they aren’t, sends an elbow flying into Corvo’s temper.

 

“They keep telling me I’m your favourite,” he says. “Billie, the woman who tried to kill me tonight, they all say I’m the one you like best. I don’t know what that means and I don’t really want to know because if this is how you treat your  _ favourite _ \- you ignored me for two years! I know now you were watching me behind my back, but that doesn’t exactly make it better. Is that what’s going to happen to me in twenty years? Am I going to be stalking your next favourite and asking them to murder me because I’ve lost your interest for the last time? Or will you be dead by then?”

 

The Outsider says, “I need you to kill a man for me.”

 

There is something past the nonchalance in his tone. Corvo might almost say he sounds  _ hurt _ , if he were interested in discerning the Outsider’s alien emotions. His fists clench. “Did you hear anything I just said? Were you listening?”

 

“Corvo,” the Outsider chides, tucking his legs up on the bed and crossing them. “I’m always listening to you. I hear every word that comes from your mouth. Every question, every prayer-”

 

“I don’t pray to you.”

 

“You used to.”

 

“That was eight years ago,” Corvo says. When he’d thought of the Outsider as his almost-benefactor, his dark patron who bestowed terrifying powers and unctuous smiles at his shrines or in the blue, blue Void. “You’re hardly even a god anymore.”

 

He doesn’t mean that. The Outsider flickers forward and up, off the ground, a display of power to disprove the words. “I could still unmake you with a blink of my eyes,” he tells Corvo. “There would be no body. Emily would never know what happened to you. It would be like you never existed, and the Empress would be left without her loyal Lord Protector for the rest of her reign. Her short, short reign.”

 

Corvo says, “You wouldn’t.”

 

The Outsider laughs. A chuckle rips from his mouth, and he is sitting again. “Unfortunately,” he says. Bitterly, perhaps. “The man I want you to kill, Corvo. His name is Levi, and I do not know where he is right now. I suggest you ask your spies. Amusing to think that you might have a better grasp of the flow of information in this city right now than I do.”

 

“Does this man have any identifying marks? A family name?”

 

“No,” the Outsider says. “He’s just Levi. Appropriate, don’t you think?”

 

Appropriate for what, Corvo makes to ask, but with those words, the Outsider is gone. Back to the grey, grey Void where he will await the completion of his request with absolute certainty of Corvo’s compliance.

 

He will have it, but not until morning. Corvo drags himself to his bed and slides under the covers, stretches out his legs and sighs. The spot where his god was sat is cold.

 

~

 

_ A man named Levi _ ? the responses from his spies - agents, he prefers agents, or contacts - read.  _ Could be anyone. I’ve not heard anything about a chap with that name. Do you have any other details? Where should we start looking for him? Is he rich, poor, is he missing a finger? I know three men who might go by that name, one more if you’re counting pillow-talk. _

 

What kind of person uses Levi as a pet-name, Corvo thinks, recalling the last note. It isn’t even a word in any other sense.

 

He started his own search in the Market District this morning. Rich or poor, his target must have to eat, and the shopkeepers he questioned were happy enough to tell the Lord Protector the name of their regulars. Likely they left off the criminals who occasionally bought from the lower-end stores; he has other sources for those. The main square had been buzzing with deliveries, food and other goods arriving from the ports, and Corvo dropped some casual inquiries to the workers as well. None of them knew a Levi.

 

Emily wasn’t at breakfast. The servants assured him she ate, and he made a point to look in on her briefly before he left. She said she was alright. She probably isn’t. He’ll have to talk to her properly later.

 

In the meantime, he is making his way through Holger Square, purposely avoiding making eye contact with the high walls and pillars of the Office of the High Overseer. The woman herself will be at Dunwall Tower again this afternoon, he hears. Swathes of residential buildings lie past the east gates, in the opposite direction to the Overseers’ back-yard. He intends to do some canvassing there, stop at one of the alehouses crammed in between apartments. He doesn’t anticipate results; the walking is more to do with filling time until his agents can ferret out a place or a rumour.

 

If only the Outsider had been able to give him more. At least he knows Levi doesn’t live in the Estate District, like Thresh. Corvo has heard his house is to be torn down and a private library built on the site for residents of the district.

 

The Office of the High Overseer finally passes him by, as does the first block of gatehouses and offices built at a respectful distance from its east wing. Not many people are out on the street here - word has spread about his attempted murder last night, and those that are not at work are staying indoors. Corvo sees City Watch, a man carrying folded clothing under his arm, a pair of Overseers making their way home. A woman, too, that he realises upon approach is quite familiar.

 

“Hello,” he calls. Cecelia waves at him and doffs her cap.

 

“Corvo, hello. I didn’t expect to see you here. I thought you’d be at the tower cleaning up after what happened yesterday.”

 

“I’m looking for someone.”

 

Cecelia’s blue eyes are troubled. “Oh, yes. I got your request. I - I haven’t had time to follow up, but I might have leads for you about that. The name.” She looks around. A Watch patrol is getting closer. “Maybe we should go somewhere more private. There’s an alley between the fourth and fifth blocks east with no windows facing into it?”

 

“That works.” He offers her his arm; she takes it after a brief hesitation and they walk on, past the patrol. Corvo ducks his head when one of the men looks at them, trying to avoid being recognised. The guard’s vacant stare proves his success.

 

His best agent’s grip on his arm is tight and her hands are cold. Her hand, rather - her other is bandaged and hangs stiff by her side. An injury? Cecelia isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, not anymore, but she still balks at head-on fights. Too many years being the quiet, unassertive servant have robbed her of the ability to find a thrill in scrapping.

 

The alley to the east is narrow, cramped, and surprisingly clean for a strip of street between two unassuming blocks. Brick walls crowd them in; the shadows obscure them enough to create the illusion of a secretive tryst that any passerby would quickly withdraw from interrupting. “Before I give you the intel,” Cecelia begins. “There’s something else I want to tell you. Actually, I was going to come find you at the tower - it’s… important.”

 

She is pale, her skin clammy before Corvo lets go of her arm. She’s more anxious than he’s seen her in years. “What is it?”

 

Slowly, Cecelia takes the end of the bandage around her hand - her left hand, her  _ left hand _ \- and unravels it. Beige fabric comes away in a single strip. And underneath-

 

Corvo draws in breath sharply, like a hiss, and curses. “When did this happen?” he asks, staring at Cecelia’s Mark with a mixture of horror and slow-burning anger. Billie, the witch, all those cultists, now Cecelia. What next? Sokolov? Samuel? The High Overseer? “How long have you had it, Cecelia?”

 

“Two days at most.” She rubs it, turning the skin redder with pressure. “I just woke up one morning and it was there. I thought at first it was ink, but it wouldn’t come off when I washed it. And it itches. Burns, sometimes.”

 

“He didn’t… speak to you?”

 

“No,” Cecelia says. “If you mean the Outsider, no, he didn’t. I’m glad for that. I wouldn’t want to meet a god.” Her eyes shift to his own hand. “Has he talked to you?”

 

He shouldn’t be surprised that Cecelia is aware of his Mark - he recalls using it in front of her at least once during the Hound Pit days, on his way back to the pub to find the traitorous Loyalists - but the question still throws him off. “Sometimes. More lately. He’s been Marking a lot of people recently, too. I’m vague on the purpose.”

 

“I haven’t tried using it.” The bandage wraps back around the Mark, hiding it from view again. “I know you can do  _ things  _ with it, Corvo, and when it hurts I almost feel like I could do something, too. Fly or - or make myself really small. It’s terrifying.”

 

“Don’t use it,” Corvo says, seized by visions of the dead cultists, bodies destroyed by their unstable Marks. “ _ Don’t _ . No matter what happens. With the way things are right now, it could kill you.” He pauses. There isn’t anything he can say otherwise that she doesn’t know or will even need - hide the Mark, avoid Overseers, eat well to keep your metabolism high, don’t believe everything  _ he  _ says. “I - I’m sorry, Cecelia.”

 

She smiles. A little colour has returned to her cheeks. “It’s not your fault. I feel better now that I’ve told you about it, anyway. You’re still the bravest man I’ve ever met.”

 

“I wouldn’t be brave enough to hang a man out on his own laundry-line.”

 

“Yes, you would,” Cecelia says. She rummages in her pocket, brings out a folded piece of rag paper and hands it to him. “Your intel, by the way. A storehouse in the Market District, an abandoned house in the Flood - excuse me, Old Banking District, and a woman called Rivel who begs near the edge of Spitters’ territory. The storehouse might be your best bet, though Rivel is closer. It was broken into by a man who left some of his belongings behind a night ago.”

 

The rag is scrawled with everything she just said, in less words. Corvo slips it into his coat. “Thank you,” he says. “If you find anything more, or if anything happens to your Mark, you know where I’ll be. And payment will be at the hearth drop tomorrow.”

 

Cecelia nods. “See you around.”

 

Frustration rises like vomit in his throat watching her quietly disappear around the far corner of the alley. Until now, the Marked have not been people he’s known - they are people he has met, encountered for the first time with their hands and their black-eyed friend in common. She hasn’t even  _ met  _ the Outsider. He hasn’t even spoken to her. He didn’t speak to those cultists. Bearing the load, Billie said back then, but Corvo isn’t sure if there isn’t something more to it than withstanding the Void’s assaults against his powers.  _ It isn’t the shrines _ -

  
He clenches his fist, nails biting into his palm. This is a debate he should have with the Outsider later. Spitter territory is a district over, near the waterfront, and he can be there in ten minutes if he commandeers a railcar. Hopefully the woman Rivel’s tongue is loose this afternoon.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yoooo hello again & ty Again for all your comments... this chapter marks a rating increase for some slightly more explicit murder and #sexual #content (obligatory disclaimer that i am not at all practiced in what i write about, including the murder). this chapter also took way too long to write and i'm happier with some parts of it than others, but i hope you enjoy it! next ch will be the last barring any sudden plot twists :")

The Spitters are a relatively new gang in the world of Dunwall, and the area they command is appropriately small. It consists of Mattson Wharf and approximately four blocks of its surroundings, though the exact borders shift on a daily basis. Once this was all part of the Dead Eels’ holdings, at the height of their influence when their territory stretched from here to old Draper’s Ward, but the Dead Eels have come and gone and their former leader has moved on to a more powerful gang, so the Spitters have staked their claim. Their name is said to come from an injury their head sustained as a child, a sleeve of ugly burns from krust spit after falling into the river. Corvo has never troubled himself to have the rumour confirmed.

 

Perhaps he should. The Watch patrols are suspiciously thin on the ground here, replaced instead by men and women in dark green clothing with chains wrapped surreptitiously around their wrists. He sees at least three pairs walking along the riverfront to the wharf, scanning the shadows for the shapes of transients.

 

It is about time for lunch, and so it seems obvious in hindsight when he finds the woman he is looking for sitting outside the Anchors Away Alehouse, soliciting every customer going in and out for just a few coin or a loaf of bread. A man flips her a coin as Corvo approaches; she thanks him profusely and then begins to swear when he is out of earshot. “Fucking malingering stingy rat-”

 

“Excuse me,” Corvo says. “Are you Rivel?”

 

She squints up at him. The coin disappears into one of the multitude of pockets in her thick navy wool coat, well-made but heavily faded and ripped at the sleeves. “Who wants to know?”

 

“I’m looking for a man-”

 

“Well, I’m not one. Golden Cat’s thattaway,” Rivel says, pointing with her middle finger. “The Madame’s been branching out. Might have somethin’ you’d like.” She holds out her cupped hands. “Got coin before you go?”

 

“Called Levi,” Corvo finishes smoothly. “A man called Levi. A friend told me you might know him.”

 

“Friend? Why would I know any friends of yours? You look rich.” Rivel taps her finger on the side of her head, winds a lock of greasy dark hair around it. “You look familiar, too - wait. Are you an Overseer? One of those fools who wanders round without his mask.” Her tapping finger moves to her nose. “There’s been lots of them lately. All round the old Abbey. They think they’re being smart not wearing that ugly religious get-up but everyone still knows what they are. You can’t hide that snooty way they walk.”

 

“I’m not an Overseer,” he says, frowning. The old Abbey was shuttered during the plague and for years afterwards, but has recently been re-consecrated and reopened to the public, so hearing that it’s swarming with Overseers should not be a surprise. _Maskless_ Overseers, though, is unusual. He is about to ask her more when she interjects.

 

“Ah! I got it. Aren’t you the one who they said killed the old Empress? The Royal Guard Dog?”

 

“Protector.”

 

“Same thing,” she says matter-of-factly. “I had money on you being that girl’s daddy, when I had money.”

 

He’s surprised she doesn’t know, if she’s aware enough of the Empress’s doings to recognise him. “I am.”

 

“How about that. You’d just have made me rich if you’d said it a sight earlier.”

 

A patron approaches the door to the alehouse, a dockworker with a crooked nose and a thick raw-red sunburnt column of a neck. He directs a contemptuous eyebrow at Rivel and makes a quick lewd sign at the two of them before entering. The door slams shut behind him. Rivel flips it off.

 

“Anyway,” she says. “What were you saying you wanted? Man named…”

 

“Levi,” Corvo supplies, trying to keep impatience out of his voice.

 

“Levi? Levi… Levi. Where’ve I heard that before.” Without warning, Rivel’s face twists, displaying an instant of putrid hatred before settling into a snarl. “Oh. You mean _Lev_ , don’t you. What in the Outsider’s cocking name do you have business with him for?”

 

It’s the Outsider who has business with him, Corvo is tempted to say. “I simply need to find him, that’s all.”

 

“Try the Void,” Rivel says. “Try hell. Lev died a month back and it was folks like you that sent him there.” She’s growing more hostile by the second, springing up from her cross-legged perch on the ground to shout at him. “People who were screwing an Empress or the Lady Filth or their own sister and threw him out a window so he wouldn’t tell. He was a bastard, but he wasn’t a _snitch_ like half the ari-fuckin-stocracy, and now I have to sit here and beg for my coin!”

 

He starts to compose an answer, something tactful that will quiet her down and allow him to make a quick getaway, and then his vision goes dim and staticky and green. His Mark stabs deep into a hand that has been temporarily robbed of existence; the body he is inhabiting feels stiff, now a mannequin for him to bend to his wishes. Possession, again. He is inside Rivel.

 

Willing himself out does nothing. Corvo clenches fists that are small and have ragged nails. From experience he knows that Rivel’s body will reject him in another thirty seconds, but it feels like an eternity. Another alehouse customer exits, sees him standing there and comments that he looks a bit green.

 

“So do you,” Corvo snaps. Through the sickly cast of his powers, he sees the man scowl at him and turn away. No sooner has he done so than the possession ends.

 

Rivel collapses in front of him onto her hands and knees and retches. “What the hell-” she curses, cutting herself short with another heave. “The hell am I doing? Hey, where’d you go, you bastard? Afraid of a poor woman like me? You sick fuck!”

 

He is halfway up the street behind the Anchors Away by the time she has regained her balance, not wanting to be tongue-lashed by what is clearly a dead end. However blind to the world below the Outsider is right now, he surely would be able to tell if the man he’s sent Corvo to kill has already been dead a month. To the Market District, then, back the way he came.

 

He takes a different route this time, bypassing the High Overseer’s office through a street running parallel to the main one, curving around Holger Square like a border fence. A paranoia has begun to rise at the back of his mind with all the Marked popping up recently - if Sokolov has noticed the amount of signs pertaining to the Outsider occurring, then the ever-zealous Overseers almost certainly have, and Rivel’s mention of maskless Overseers has him worrying. He resolves to investigate later.

 

Many of the stores in the Market District are empty at this hour of the day; signs adorn their locked entrances reading ‘Gone for Lunch’. The few cafes and kiosks he walks by are doing roaring trades in skewered meat and sandwiches, made deftly with the cheapest materials available and sold for a coin each. Despite the Market District’s proximity to Dunwall Tower, most of the nobility prefer to dine at home or in restaurants in the Estate District, leaving the middle and working class to sell their produce in the shadow of the Empress’s residence. Corvo has always found it an odd juxtaposition, though he supposes it is a convenient way for the tower to keep supplied in fresh goods.

 

The address for the burgled storehouse is written on the rag paper Cecelia gave him. No. Eight Farriers Lane is off the main district street, behind a grocery store with a large glass windowpane that gives Corvo a good glance at the owner and employee devouring their lunch behind the main counter. The storehouse’s door is locked, but the window the burglar used has not been fixed, simply taped over. He removes the tape and clambers inside.

 

Broken glass nicks his hand on the way in. Corvo winces, clenches his fist, looks around the storehouse. It is a deceptively small building, lined with shelves from top to bottom. Crates are stacked everywhere, filled with fresh and canned produce; at least one crate has gone rotten, and the resulting odour of good food and bad mixed together is distinctly unappetising. A locked door leads through to the store in front, he guesses.

 

On a table against the back wall of the storehouse is a stack of things that don’t look like they belong - a leatherbound journal falling apart at the seams, a shiv fashioned from broken glass, and a small figure carved from wood. He picks up the latter and inspects it. It looks oddly like Emily as a child, a young girl with a bow in her hair shaped elegantly with a whittling knife.

 

The shiv he leaves, and continues on to the journal. It has no name on the inside cover and has only scattered entries. From a brief scan Corvo discerns that the storehouse’s intruder was a carpenter before being driven out of business and into homelessness by the plague, like so many others in the city. The most recent entry refers to the wooden figure - a carving of his niece, dead nine years, and signed with his name on the feet.

 

Corvo looks back at the figure. He has left it standing upright like he found it, so he takes it in his hands again to see the underside of its feet. There, notched skillfully in the wood, is the name ‘Levi’.

 

Murmurs of voices carry through to him from the door back to the grocery. The owner and worker must be ready to get back to work. He stands the figure back up on the table and slips the journal into a pocket of his jacket before heading back to the window to exit. His right hand stings from the earlier scratch at the sight of the broken glass; he pulls his jacket sleeves down over his hands to prevent further injury.

 

Outside, Corvo makes his way a block from the storehouse, back towards the tower, to find a wall he can lean against to study the journal in more detail. The man who wrote it unfortunately has given more thought to detailing his past than his present, naming old haunts and former colleagues, reflecting on the days when he had been respected as a craftsman. The personal insights make Corvo uneasy; there is nothing to suggest that this man is a bad one, that he has ever committed a crime - besides the break-in at the store - or heresy. There is nothing to explain why the Outsider wants this man dead.

 

His eyes light upon the second-last entry in the journal, and a sudden flash of recognition hits him. Levi had written about a woman by the name of Loren who he hopes might shelter him if he finds food. There is a boarding-house on the edge of the district run by a Loren Clasky where some of the market workers stay in exchange for a little coin or alcohol if they can’t afford the money. Corvo has never been there himself, but he recalls a Watch investigation of the place a year ago that turned up nothing. Clasky is apparently not one to harbour criminals, despite whispers back then that one gang or another kept caches in her house.

 

He pushes off the wall and slaps the journal closed in his hand. It’s another lead. If it doesn’t pan out, he still has the place Cecelia gave him in the Flooded District to check.

 

~

 

The boarding-house is familiar when he reaches it. Corvo does not think he has ever passed it; the familiarity is one of similarity to half a dozen other lodgings built thirty years ago and occupied constantly ever since. Red brick stained with mud continues up for a good five storeys in front of him. A finely lettered sign is hung over the door proclaiming that no rooms are currently available.

 

A woman answers the door to him. She has dark skin and the characteristic reddish eyelids of a cured plague sufferer - she must’ve been a child then, he decides. “Can I help you? The sign says we’ve no rooms,” she says curtly.

 

“I’m looking for a man called Levi,” Corvo says. He makes to pull the journal from his pocket, then decides against it. She might decide to take it to him herself if Levi is here, and he wants to see the man. Before he kills him, if possible. “Do you have someone of that name living here?”

 

“Why?” A scowl narrows the woman’s features. “Has he done something? I don’t like troublemakers here, so you’d best tell me now.”

 

This must be Loren Clasky, then. “No, he’s not in trouble.”

 

Unexpectedly, her face clears. “Then - you must be a friend, right? Or a doctor? That’s good. If he’s not in trouble then I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with him, he’s been locked in his room for the last three days. I was about considering getting Marcus to break his door down if he didn’t come out soon.” She opens the door wider and Corvo sees that she is dressed in a remarkably clean brown coat that was made for someone with a much wider frame than her. The sleeves drop over her hands as she lowers them to her sides; she pulls them back up to her wrists irritably. “I think he went out the window the other night, but he was back in by the morning.”

 

“Where is his room?”

 

“This floor. Third on the right. That’s how he was able to get out the window and not break his damn neck.” Loren Clasky shakes her head. “Might have to stop giving them their own keys at this rate. I can’t believe I didn’t think to have another master made after I lost the last one.”

 

She lets Corvo past her and closes the front door. Inside, the boarding-house is scrubbed white walls and dark wood floors. A square arch opens into a communal room with cheap plyboard tables and chairs on the right. The left is a landing for a staircase that stretches up into the rest of the building, and directly before them is a hallway with doors spaced evenly along it. “You’ll be alright with the room on your own?”

 

“Yes,” Corvo says, and Clasky nods and vanishes through the first door on the right. He hears a bolt being drawn behind her and sees her silhouette in his altered vision sit down at a desk in what he presumes are her living quarters. He wonders how she came to own this building, why she decided to house people in it and take so little in return in a city that chews up the good and the innocent and spits out their bones. The public sale records can tell him the former, but the latter will remain a mystery known only to her.  


The third room on the right, as Clasky said, is locked. The man called Levi is inside, kneeling on the floor, golden figure rocking back and forth occasionally before freezing stock still when Corvo knocks and calls his name. “I have something of yours,” he says through the door. “I believe you dropped it. I wanted to return it to you.”

 

No answer. “Are you alright in there?”

 

He feels as if he is standing outside Emily’s room, as if he _should_ be standing outside Emily’s room putting the same question to her and not here with his sword ready at his belt. She killed last night out of necessity. He is about to do the same thing out of probably misguided loyalty to the Outsider. “Levi?”

 

A groan from inside the room reaches him. The figure resumes its shaky movement. Corvo weighs up whether he should break down the door himself, or try to pick the lock, or chance using his powers to direct a rat through a vent from upstairs. Actually - he turns on his heel and goes back to the front door. If Levi got back into his room after burgling the storehouse via the window, that might be the best way for him to get in too.

 

Nobody sees him exit the house, and Loren Clasky makes no move to leave her desk as he treads quietly past her door. Outside, he counts the windows, glass clumsily frosted with dried oil to preserve the privacy of the ground floor residents, and finds the one that should open into the third room on the right. It resists his attempts to pull it up at first, then gives with a creak.

 

The man sitting on the floor reacts when Corvo vaults through his window by giving a startled cry and uncurling from his position on the floor. “Who the- Are you the one who was trying to get into my room?”

 

Corvo tugs the window shut. “I am,” he says. The man he has come here to kill looks startled, but not frightened. He is dressed like many poorer citizens of Dunwall, in a colourlessly grey overcoat and pants, blending with the dark floorboards and white-washed walls that persist from the corridors beyond his locked door. “I wanted to give this back to you.”

 

“You said,” Levi says. His voice is thin, reedy, and his complexion is disturbingly pale. Unnaturally dilated pupils fill his sea-blue eyes to brimming, sunken above cracked lips into a face that is hollow with starvation and sickness - he is clearly ill, dangerously so. A wasting fever or a strain of influenza, Corvo guesses. “What is it?”

 

“Your journal.”

 

“Journal?” He almost doesn’t seem to comprehend for a moment, then looks confused. “I don’t need that thing anymore. I can start a new one when I’m well again. Loren said she’d bring me elixir if I got food, left it outside the door. I locked myself in so nobody else gets sick. You ruined that, though. You should probably get out of here before you catch it.”

 

“I’m sure I’ll be fine.” Corvo has consumed enough elixir in his lifetime to cure a whole town of all their ailments; he would be surprised if he could still fall victim to anything short of a revived rat plague.

 

Levi is unfolding from the floor, shakily getting to his feet. His thin frame looks like it had muscle once, the heavy arms and thick joints and contrastingly delicate hands of a carpenter-whittler. All he has left now are the hands. “Who are you, anyway? You’re not a doctor - you don’t look like one. I don’t know you. Are you a friend of Loren?”

 

“I,” Corvo begins to say, preparing to give some convenient-sounding lie - he doesn’t need to, he should have killed Levi the moment he stepped foot in this room - but he is stopped cold by a rippling of the world. A _wrongness_ pervades his surroundings like a sudden sea breeze, and then the Outsider is materialising behind Levi.

 

He isn’t solid, not entirely. He is more mirage than man, a horrible black-eyed dream bleeding into the living world. He tilts his head.

 

“What?” Levi says, and turns around. For a split second, he is completely frozen. Corvo can see his shock and terror in every clenched muscle, and he finds it inexplicably strange that the man is too scared to scream. The Outsider’s brand of theatrical demonry has become so familiar to him that he has forgotten that other people feel more than vague indescribable unsettlement at the thought of him.

 

Right now, though, his vague unsettlement is becoming more solid, because the Outsider is still tilting his head, so far over that it would’ve snapped if he were an ordinary human, and then a sharp noise cracks. Levi finally makes a sound, a choking cough, and swings back towards Corvo. He reaches for him - there is a Mark burning itself into his hand.

 

The Outsider looks right at Corvo, eyes glistening the black of congealed blood. He vanishes.

 

“I’m sorry,” Corvo says to Levi, whose expression is a mixture of fright and bewilderment, whose clammy skin is the same shade of pale as the Outsider’s. His sword pierces the soft flesh of the man’s neck with little difficulty; he gurgles once, choking on blood instead of phlegm, then collapses.

 

He bristles with what it takes him a moment to realise is anger, thick and heady. He isn’t sure what to do with the fresh corpse; he could hide it under the bed, leave the door locked. Loren would find it eventually, though, and she might connect the inevitably rotten body with the man who came to give Levi his journal back.

 

The answer comes as a whisper in his ear from the other side of the fabric of reality: _The river, Corvo. Take him to the river._

 

~

 

It was raining eight years ago, when he climbed the lighthouse.

 

The sky was grey trimmed with black and the occasional bright flash of lightning, striking far away in the distance. The thunder and the wind muffled his footsteps, but Martin still heard him coming. Pendleton still saw him illuminated in the glare of the catwalk floodlights, slitting his personal guard’s throat, and Havelock saw him and pulled Emily’s struggling, small - oh so small - figure to him and threatened to jump.

 

The first two died without him laying a hand on them. Havelock he shot himself, the admiral’s brutish form falling forward on top of Emily. She climbed out from underneath him, not crying but _shaking_ , trembling with rage and declared, “I was going to have them killed, anyway.”

 

When she was safe in the boat with Callista and Geoff Curnow, her hands kissed and her hair combed, he dragged their bodies all the way to the top of the lighthouse. Martin with his clever brains blown out, his sly mouth slack. He hadn’t been smiling when he denied Corvo his final revenge. Pendleton’s vilely aristocratic features were already nibbled by rats when he got to him.

 

He laid them down in a clump at the edge of the balcony, and stared. He hadn’t thought they were different; he had never believed in their morals and decency as much as they seemed to. They had asked him to kill for them, after all. But he had believed that they wanted Emily on the throne, _really_ on the throne where they could have whatever favours they asked for from a grateful child Empress.

 

What a fool he was. What a fool he still is, he thinks.

 

Levi’s body is hoisted over his shoulder. It is already cold, the cold of a body longer dead, hurried along by his illness. He has come over the rooftops down to a spot on the riverfront where he knows there will be nobody even in the mid-afternoon. This inlet feeds straight into the ocean - the corpse will be washed away to the sea, where it will join the bodies of the leviathans.

 

Leviathans. Levi. Corvo’s lips twist in an angry smile.

 

Down the bank he walks, careful not to slip and lose his balance. The river comes high at the tide here and the stone is wet and mossy. He swings the body off his shoulder and to the ground, to the water, and lets the river take Levi from his hands.

 

The current is slow. The body drifts slowly, face-up, with the thin line on its neck still red and seeping from where his sword cut deep and true. He’s vaguely surprised the head is still attached; it probably won’t be by the time the fish and decomposition have finished with it. There are no hagfish in this inlet, or the body would already be stripped.

 

They never found the bodies of the Loyalists. Not that anybody would have bothered to look, but if they had, there would be nothing but bloodstains where no other corpses had fallen, because after Corvo was done staring, he dumped them all off the lighthouse. One by one, heaving them up with tired arms, throwing them over the edge. The sea could have them.

 

He made an exception for Havelock - he didn’t pick him up. He put his boot on the top of his caved-in skull and kicked, watched him tumble head over heels and make a tiny splash far below. Likely not the impact Havelock thought he would have on history, he’d thought savagely, and considered jumping after him.

 

The boat with Emily on it floated into view then, and Corvo turned his back on the lighthouse balcony and went down to resume his post as Lord Protector.

 

He stands on the riverbank now and thinks about jumping in this time - not to kill himself, but to clean the blood off his clothes. Literally, not symbolically, because he isn’t like Daud. He doesn’t believe that he can stop killing anymore; he doesn’t believe that he can escape everything he has ever done. Nor does he want to, because Corvo knows that there are three constants in this world, three inescapable things: death, sin, and the Outsider.

 

Perhaps only two, he amends, because the Outsider keeps hinting that he intends to thwart the first. Or perhaps only one, because the Overseers consider ‘sin’ and the Outsider to be one and the same concept, and the conclusion that he is rapidly approaching is that the Outsider is the only constant on this particular plain of reality.

 

Corvo is not quite sure how to react to this conclusion, but luckily he is saved from having to do so by a startling, “Oi!”

 

He turns on his heel and sees a man approaching from the streets, a man in the characteristic navy tunic and hard-hat of the City Watch and accompanied by a dog. The hound is bounding ahead of him and making an unsettling snarl; Corvo recognises it as the trained sound of a dog with the scent of blood. He looks back at the water and sees Levi’s body, not far away from shore that it is indistinguishable from general river garbage, easily still smelt as human remains. Not an ideal situation.

 

“You there!” the Watch guard yells to him, striding forward with his hand clamped around his standard-issue baton. “Stay where you are! If you try and run, I’m authorised to use deadly force!” A lie, which he apparently re-thinks and amends with, “I can’t promise my hound won’t take a bite out of you!”

 

The dog certainly looks vicious enough, and it is closing faster than its master. Corvo clenches his fist, nails digging into his palm, and Blinks up to a nearby streetlight.

 

“What…?” The guard stops in his tracks. “Witchcraft?”

 

By the time he has caught up with his dog at the riverfront, Levi’s body has sunk beneath the waves, the river parting like a Pandyssian legend to allow it entrance, and there is no evidence that it or Corvo were ever there at all.

 

~

 

He Blinks freely from the streetlight to the opposite rooftop, and from there to the next roof. The Mark is groaning soundlessly in pain on his hand at the constant use - he had to carry the corpse with it, too - but Corvo is ignoring it. He flickers across the buildings of the Distillery District and beyond. He doesn’t know which way he’s going. Not home, where he should be.

 

His mind is full of slit throats and blood and he is still angry, at the Outsider for sending him to kill an innocent man for some purpose he will probably never disclose, at himself for doing it. He is angry that he isn’t angrier that the Outsider has invaded his life again, and he is tired. The mana drain from racing over Dunwall’s ceiling like he is doing now is incredible. After fifteen minutes, he oversteps, falls two storeys onto a balcony. The cut he got from the broken window at the Market District storehouse opens again.

 

“Fuck,” Corvo says to himself, bleeding on the railing of somebody’s house in a part of the city that he can’t place in this state.

 

He should go back to the tower. He should talk to his daughter. He should ignore the buzzing at the back of his skull that he is now realising isn’t just the exhaustion, it’s a rune in the house he has just crashed down onto. Trust him to stumble directly into an Outsider shrine when worship is the last thing from his mind.

 

It might not be a whole shrine, he thinks, but when he turns around there is purple light streaming from the cracks in the door to the house’s inside. The buzzing grows louder and more insistent, like a swarm of Serkonan bloodflies nesting in his hair.

 

Corvo opens the door with his uninjured hand, and the Outsider is there.

 

The room into which he walks, half-staggering, is swathed completely in purple fabric, the Outsider like a brown-black stain perched atop the usual table. Where there would be glassy black stone are thick crystals, blue and white and almost sparkling. The Outsider catches his eyes and says, “Ice crystals. Aren’t they exquisite? He brought them with him all the way from Tyvia.”

 

“Another Marked lives here?”

 

“For now.” He isn’t hovering at all today, and is far more solid than he was a mere hour ago, appearing as a death-bringing ghost before Levi. “He isn’t here right now.”

 

“Why?” Corvo asks.

 

“Gone to buy food-”

 

“You know that’s not what I meant,” he says, taking a step towards the Outsider. His hands are curling painfully into fists, damn his injury and his Mark. “Why did you have me kill that man? Why did you Mark him before he died?”

 

The Outsider says, “It was necessary. Levi is necessary to what I’m planning.”

 

“And what _are_ you planning,” Corvo says, demands. “When are you going to tell me what you’re trying to do to outrun death?”

 

“Nobody can outrun death,” the Outsider declares, stepping down onto the floor. “It marches forward at a steady pace and ignores all obstacles. You of all people should know that, Corvo. How many times have you gotten at your targets no matter how many guards, how many technological security devices and locked doors they put in your way? The end of life is an inevitability that all things understand.” He purses his lips. “I don’t have any more requests for you, if that makes you feel better.”

 

It doesn’t. “So now what. You disappear again now that I’ve fulfilled everything you asked of me? I don’t see you again for two years or eight years. Or forever. I just go back to Dunwall Tower and hide this Mark on my hand for the rest of my life.” Until his hair turns grey and the Outsider’s ageless form floats above his deathbed and condescends to thank him for his service. He can imagine it with perfect clarity.

 

“That’s what you think of me.” Inscrutability reigns in the Outsider’s black eyes.

 

“That’s what I _know_ of you.” Corvo takes a few more steps towards him, trying not to raise his voice, to raise his fist and hit him because- “I know you’re a god, and maybe that means you have some kind of right to not care about small human lives, but would it kill you to stop playing games and talking in riddles? Just _once_.”

 

The Outsider stares at him thoughtfully, and then he dissipates like ink dissolving into water and unexpected panic suffuses Corvo’s veins. He’s gone, he’s left again, the next time he’ll see him will be with his dying breath and he won’t even have the strength to tell him to go screw himself.

 

He walks forward to the shrine, breath frosting as he gets closer to the ice crystals that another Marked brought from Tyvia, places a hand on it like he’s willing the Outsider to come back. He knows it won’t do anything. Time and time again, the Outsider has proven that he does not come when called, but when Corvo turns around, he is there.

 

Corvo’s breath hitches in surprise. The Outsider is close, close enough to reach up and sit three fingers under Corvo’s chin and tilt his head down, and his skin is colder than the ice piled on his shrine. “I changed my mind,” he says. “I do have another task for you.”

 

This close, his eyes are not just black but flecked with something darker than black, swirling like the Void’s entire abyssal presence is contained in them. “What is it?”

 

“Kiss me,” the Outsider says, in the same cadence as when he asked Corvo to kill for him.

 

“Are you-” His voice cracks in incredulity, lowers to an almost-whisper. “Are you serious?”

 

Days ago, he might’ve pushed the Outsider away, repeated his words with a curse in the middle. He asked him not play games and this is what he gets - a hand that burns like dry ice, so cold it feels like an open flame, cupping his face and the voice he hears in his dreams saying, “I’m always serious.”

 

He swallows it all down, his uncertainty and fading anger both, and does what is asked of him. The Outsider’s lips are icy like the rest of him, crushing against his with the force of tides, tasting of nothing at all and once Corvo has brought the first kiss to completion he cannot bring himself to break away. The back of his knees hits the shrine, the Outsider pressing forward into him.

 

It has been a very long time since Corvo last was kissed or touched, but he is sure it was not exactly like this; the way the Outsider claws at his waist with blunt nails, the teeth in his mouth that are not sure whether they want to be smooth or sharp, the thin and entirely angular body that he has most often seen hanging in the air or folded into a lazy recline suddenly flush against his. Jessamine was-

 

The Outsider kisses him hard and possessive and he cannot, will not think of Jessamine. This is unlike what they had in every way - it is a release, a surrendering, the culmination of years of sly glances and wary frustration and he realises that he has already accepted - decided - that this will be more than a few kisses. He pulls away, eyes the Outsider’s marble cheekbones free of human trivialities like a blush, says, “What - do you want me to do now?”

 

“Nothing,” the Outsider says. The hands at his waist slide underneath his shirt and chill his skin, then pause, return to begin working at his jacket’s fastenings. “Just be silent.”

 

The jacket tailored to his frame by the finest clothiers imperial money can buy is on the floor in moments, the vest underneath following shortly, but the Outsider does not take off his shirt. He unbuttons it, inspects the thin sliver of tanned flesh revealed to him by the action and then kisses him again, dragging his fingers down Corvo’s chest, over his heart. Corvo tries to return the favour, only to be gently rebuked, his hands guided away from what he imagines to be an unbeating breast of white stone underneath all that brown leather. He supposes he doesn’t mind; in another place he might’ve pushed harder, fulfilled a desire he didn’t know he had to strip his god to the skin and mark him back, but right now he is content with this. The Outsider’s hands tug his hair, move to undo his belt - he takes one and lays a kiss to the pale wrist.

 

The Outsider’s mouth quirks, and he looks about to say something as he watches Corvo pull up his sleeve and press his lips to his delicate upper arm, perhaps something about sentimental gestures. He holds his tongue and undoes Corvo’s belt with one hand, pulls it free and sinks to his knees with one fluid motion.

 

Corvo has never knelt for the Outsider, not on purpose, but the role reversal inherent in a god supplicant before his worshipper sends a thrill down his spine. He leans his back against the shrine as a brace, tries not to make a noise when the Outsider has his thighs bare and is resting his hard cheek against them. He fails a moment later when his cock is bare too, and the Outsider takes him into his mouth, running his tongue long and languid the same way he speaks.

 

It really has been a long time. So long that he struggles not to tip completely over the edge too quickly, trying to keep his balance and his silence intact. The Outsider’s wet mouth withdraws, replaced by delicate fingers stroking and pumping and there is an odd sensation in Corvo’s hand, too, coiled in the Outsider’s dark hair. The Mark sings with every half-thrust of his hips; he wonders if that’s because of who is before him. It’s never done that when he was alone.

 

He holds out for a minute more against the pleasant throbbing in his hand and his cock, against the Outsider alternating hands and tongue and nuzzling into his thighs with the hard line of his nose. The Outsider swallows him down when he comes, surprisingly gently, a wave of pleasure like the ocean lapping at his toes, and then it is over.

 

The Outsider stands. He licks his lips clean and crowds Corvo in to kiss him again; Corvo belatedly thinks that he might be expected to do something for the Outsider in return, but he seems finished when he pulls back. Not a hair on his head is out of place despite Corvo’s earlier tight grip.

 

“Have you... ever done that before?” Corvo asks impulsively.

 

“No.”

 

He half-expects the Outsider to lift up off the floor and resume his usual position, perhaps move a few metres away to observe Corvo clean himself up, but instead he stays close, occasionally making as if to touch him again. It is as if the boundary between them, once broken, can never be erected again.

 

Corvo says, “I guess I really am your favourite,” and immediately feels ridiculous for it. That old reverence lurks at the edge of his mind again; the fascination he held years ago when his Mark was fresh has returned to temper his more recent cynical outlook on the god before him.

 

A bemused smile. “You are.” A pause, then a very carefully said, “I’m not supposed to have favourites.”

 

“Supposed to?”

 

“The Void is a living thing,” the Outsider says, as if he is changing the subject. It does not possess consciousness like you or I, but it still has whims and desires, and the most prominent of these is to expand. It devours the edges of reality, ever seeking new knowledge. It enjoys its energy being prodded into new shapes by those I Mark and it does not like being… constrained. It does not like when I focus singularly on something or become attached.” He pauses again and blinks, tilts his head in that familiar way. “As I have… to you.”

 

It takes him a moment to sort through the sudden speech. “Attached? What, are you saying that you’re in love with me?” Another foolish thing to say, he thinks. Maybe the Overseers have a point when they preach about the dangers of wanton flesh.

 

“No. I don’t feel love,” the Outsider states, saying the word like something dirty he might hold up as far away from him as possible. “Not like humans do, anyway. But I do feel great affection for you, Corvo.”

 

The declaration leaves them both silent, Corvo trying to work out if he has to say something in kind. He couldn’t even if it was required of him; he suspects it will take at least a week for him to entirely reconcile everything that has just happened. It isn’t even evening yet. He killed Levi not two hours ago, and the recollection drives him to ask, “Then will you tell me what you’re planning? Why I’ve been doing all these things for you? And the other Marked, too.”

 

The Outsider spreads his hands wide. “Tears,” he says. “Blood, sweat, earth, stone, river water, bones, creatures dead and refined to their essence, many more Marks than I would usually give in a human lifetime. And a vessel. They’re grounding. Anchors for when the tide hits and I-” He stops, frowns.

 

“Outrun death?” Corvo suggests wryly.

 

“You cannot outrun death,” the Outsider repeats. “And I don’t plan to. But I can hide from it, for a while.”

 

His frown deepens, and he steps back from Corvo, who has finished righting his clothing. “Something is wrong,” he says, his feet no longer touching the floor. The room in this house that does not belong to either of them is cold; Corvo turns, motivated by a premonition, to see that the ice crystals on the shrine have melted to a puddle of filthy green water. When he turns back, the Outsider is the same way he was in Levi’s room, skin so pale it has turned translucent and he can see the closed door to the balcony overlooking the city through him. He is shivering.

 

“What,” Corvo starts to say, alert and disturbed by yet another state of being he has never seen the Outsider in, before there is black _stuff_ coming off the sleeves of the Outsider’s jacket and his face and he has disappeared the same way he always does, but this time with a look of distinct alarm on his face.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey lads... guess what... this isn't the last chapter
> 
> ty as always for the kind comments and honestly shout-out to hyperion your comments are always so lovely and are a big part of my motivation at this point!! as a split-off chapter, this is a bit shorter than the last few have been, but i do hope to make up for that with the Grand Finale (ch 8 will definitely 100% be the last one) and i hope you like it regardless...

Afterwards, Corvo goes home.

 

There isn’t a lot else he can do, despite the worry gnawing at his insides like swarms of rats. His Mark hasn’t burnt off his hand, and he still has his powers, so he knows that what he saw wasn’t the Outsider dying. It likely wasn’t even the Outsider being mortally wounded, but he has no way of knowing what is happening right now in a world outside his own that he usually visits only in dreams. If he were to go to sleep-

 

He dismisses the thought as he approaches the market-side entrance to Dunwall Tower. Guards wave him through the gates with nods of recognition, and he is past them and winding his way to the main lawns far sooner than any of the other envious other visitors trying to get into the tower. This late in the afternoon, there aren’t many. There aren’t many patrols on the grounds, either, he notes with dissatisfaction. Not enough after last night - and it was only last night. It seems weeks ago.

 

As often, he turns around before he pushes open the heavy doors to the tower’s front entrance, directing his eyes towards the gazebo where Jessamine’s memorial lies, where he once visited and found a well-sharpened blade left as offering. It stands resolute against the background of the city; Corvo closes his eyes briefly and then goes inside.

 

His chambers are much as he left them this morning, with letters neatly piled on top of his desk after reading and his shelves dusted by whoever is assigned to do those things while he isn’t here. The most surprising thing there is his daughter, sat quietly in his chair reading a book on types of poisons. She looks up when he comes in.

 

“Father,” Emily says, smiling, and then he shuts the door and slips off his jacket and she sees the blood on his shirt. “Father - what-”

 

Corvo shakes his head at her. Her face goes hard, briefly, before setting into the expression he remembers her wearing that night he was drugged, meeting him at the door and asking him how many he’d killed. He moves to his drawers and begins rifling through them for a fresh shirt. Emily behind him has put down her book. She is not going to ask him about it, he realises after he has found a shirt and she still hasn’t spoken; after all, she killed last night, too.

 

It is a sobering thought to know that they have that in common now. Emily is eighteen, at once the child he and Jessamine had together and taught to call them Mummy and Daddy in secret and also an adult woman who rules the entire Isles on her mother’s throne and has known the give of flesh under her knife. Corvo removes his shirt from the drawer and steps into his bedchamber to shed the old one and button the new.

 

“I was going to ask you to have dinner with me,” Emily calls through the door. “Up here, if you’d rather, but the table’s all set up downstairs too. I wanted to talk to you about… things.”

 

The witch, she means. He fastens the last button into place, suddenly recalls the Outsider’s thin fingers undoing them earlier and has to give himself a mental slap. “It’s quieter up here,” he says, opening the bedroom door.

 

“I’ll have it sent up, then.” Emily gets up from her chair. “Only be a minute,” she says, and she is, returning with a serving girl in tow and another chair. Corvo sweeps the letters off his desk, removes his books and places them all in a drawer. His thoughts drift to the bottom drawer, the one he keeps locked at all times - the one with the Heart’s box and a rune and a whale oil lamp cushioned with a folded scrap of purple fabric. He’ll try later, perhaps, see if the Outsider will reveal himself smug and unharmed.

 

Dinner is a light salad course followed by roasted pork in possibly the heaviest sauce Corvo has ever tasted, apple and fig and Pandyssian spice that makes it impossible to simply nibble at the meal - he has to take large bites, like Emily is doing. The food impairs their conversation, not that they have had much of one so far. He asks what she did all day, she tells him it was mostly advisory meetings. She asks what he did all day, he tells her what she has already assumed - she doesn’t want to know.

 

Emily puts down her fork when she’s eaten most of her main course and says, “How quickly did it take you to get used to it?”

 

“Not long,” Corvo says. He puts down his own cutlery and sits back. “Faster than it should have. I was younger than you were, even, but that was an accident. I didn’t do it on purpose until past your age.”

 

“I’ve…” She trails off, staring at him intently. “I’ve seen a lot of bodies before. I’ve seen you kill.”

 

He says, “It isn’t the same.”

 

“No, I suppose it’s not. I don’t want to say it felt  _ good _ , Father, but it felt - satisfactory. I was doing something right, I was stopping her from killing you or me. I was saving your life.” Her hand is clutching the table. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat, and I don’t think that’s wrong of me. There are so many people who’d like to see me dead with my throat cut that it seems silly to stay my own hand.”

 

He feels a strong pang of sorrow when he imagines what Jessamine might think to hear her daughter saying something like this, what Jessamine would think of a world that killed Emily’s innocence when it killed her, and then he is proud. Then he is irrevocably grateful that she will never be unprotected from the world’s hard edges like her mother was for that fateful moment. “Violence isn’t always the only way, of course.”

 

“Of course,” Emily says. “Of course it isn’t. But sometimes it is.”

 

The serving girl brings up a tartlet and cream for Corvo, a slice of spiced-orange cake for Emily, and he makes them both coffee, imported Serkonan. He has always drunk coffee, even since he was a child. His sister ridiculed him for drinking that bitter adult drink. Emily laughs when he tells her. “You’ve never mentioned my aunt before,” she comments.

 

“I haven’t seen her in a very long time,” Corvo says, sipping his coffee. “I don’t really have any other family, besides you.” He pauses, adds, “It’s nice. To hear you calling me Father more often.”

 

“It’s nice to be able to call you that.” Emily’s eyes are bright above her coffee cup. She takes a sip, mirroring her father, and they fall into a comfortable silence, sitting and drinking while the sky outside Corvo’s window darkens to a faintly moon-lit black. It is unnaturally dark for early evening, but he does not find it foreboding in the slightest; it makes the inside of his chambers seem cosier, lamps shining warm light over him and his daughter. These are the times he values the most nowadays.

 

A knock on his door breaks the room’s stillness. Emily leaves her empty cup and lets in the serving girl to remove all their dishes. Corvo rebuffs her offer to wipe down his desk and sweep the floor free of crumbs, saying he will do it himself in the morning, and then they are alone again.

 

Emily says, “I suppose I should go to bed. High Overseer Drew wants to see me  _ again _ in the morning. She’s really putting a lot of pressure on me at the moment.” She sighs. “I wish she didn’t hate me. Or at least that she was able to not show it so much.”

 

“You could always refuse to see her,” Corvo says. His daughter gives him a rueful smile, but says nothing. They both know that she can’t in all good conscience really refuse a meeting from the High Overseer; no matter how far the Abbey has fallen in political influence these days, they are still a large faction with sway over a troublesome enough amount of people.

 

He motions towards the still half-open door. “Well, if you say you should get some rest, I’m obliged to agree. An Empress needs her sleep.”

 

There is a sound behind him, a small whoosh like a candle being blown out, and Emily’s face suddenly shifts from quiet amusement to anger, brows drawn and shoulders tensed in alertness. “How did you get in here?” she demands.

 

The skin on Corvo’s back prickles. He turns, expecting -  _ hoping _ \- to see a thin figure levitating off the floor.

 

He is met instead with a red coat and whaler mask perched on the inside frame of his window, holding up her hands in the universal gesture of surrender. “The same way he does,” Billie says, nodding towards Corvo. She takes off her mask, revealing a mouth twisted in a sour smile. “I’m not here to hurt you, Empress. Or your father.”

 

“Shut the door, Em,” Corvo says. To Billie, he asks, “I thought you were going back to Morley.”

 

“I was. The ship I booked passage on was scuttled in the harbour. I haven’t had luck finding another.”

 

“Scuttled by who?”

 

Billie steps down from the window frame. He can sense Emily looking between the two of them, her hand still poised ready to draw the knife strapped at her hip in an instant. “Overseers,” Billie says. “It took me longer than expected to find them. Mostly because I was looking for gang members, not religious nuts. They were fed information that a heretic was attempting to flee Dunwall on that ship.”

 

“Not far from the truth,” Corvo comments.

 

His daughter stiffens further.

 

“I didn’t get a lot more out of the Overseers I talked to before I had to dispose of them. Just insults and spoutings of the Strictures. They are aware that there are more Marked in Dunwall than usual, though. I’m not sure how.” Billie’s hood is lowered too, and a sharp gust of wind through the window ruffles her hair. The sky outside is clouded now - he can almost smell a rainstorm brewing. Odd when it was so clear earlier.

 

“Should I be listening to this?” Emily says. “I don’t know who you are, but if you’re-” she touches her left hand, indicating a Mark. “Then I don’t imagine I want to be here.”

 

Billie stares at her, gaze heavy and probing, ready to deliver her judgement on the young Empress, but she doesn’t get a chance.

 

“If you didn’t want to be here before, you certainly won’t now, Emily Kaldwin,” the fourth person in Corvo’s now thoroughly crowded office says, and he has never been so glad to hear that sleek, otherworldly voice, nor to see the fabric of reality quailing in approach of the Void’s god. “The Overseers would call you complicit in a case of heresy most extreme, but I would say it’s only right of you to be kept informed of everything that happens in your city, natural and supernatural.”

 

“ _ You _ -”

 

“I,” the Outsider says.

 

“The black-eyed ghost,” Emily interrupts him, the whites of her own eyes clearly evident in shock. “At my tower. You-”

 

She breaks off as a shiver goes through the Outsider, a flickering of black smoke over his skin that shows them the flesh and bone under his pale skin before returning it to normal - as much as the Outsider can be normal. Corvo is surprised. He would’ve expected there to be nothing but the Void underneath the Outsider’s coverings, but he supposes he should know better now, after feeling those bones pressed against him.

 

Corvo steps towards him almost instinctively, and the Outsider’s gaze snaps to him. “I apologise for leaving you so abruptly earlier, Corvo. Something… came up.”

 

“Something?” Billie asks.

 

“The Overseers are conducting a ritual to hasten my death,” the Outsider says, as if that’s something that makes complete and total sense.

 

Billie looks to Corvo, bewilderment oddly softening her features. Emily says, “ _ What _ ?”

 

“They have based their whole religion, their whole lives, around hating me. Watching for signs of my presence is doctrine for most in the service of the Abbey. It’s only natural that they would be able to figure out that my time is ending. I believe you’ve seen their private library downstairs, Corvo.” The Outsider’s smile is unpleasant. “The dying whales, the increased amount of heretics in this city.” He gestures to the window. “Even now, the heavens are beginning to stir. Because of me.”

 

A low rumble of thunder in the distance underscores his words, followed by the chitter of rain beginning to thud and drip down the walls of Dunwall Tower, and Corvo recalls what Rivel said to him just this morning - maskless Overseers. The collection of books in the library on heretical symbols, High Overseer Drew’s insistence on meeting with Emily so often of late, as if she is drawing the Empress’s attention away from the movements of her underlings-

 

“I think,” Corvo says slowly. “It’s time for you to tell us what your plan is, Outsider.”

 

His chamber feels oppressively small in the ensuing silence. The rain is picking up; a cold breeze shudders against the walls and the lit lamps dim, shadows intermingling over Corvo’s desk. The Outsider sighs. “The Void wants me out,” he says. “I’m going to give it what it wants. A properly prepared human body can sustain my consciousness for longer than a typical lifetime, and it is better than the alternative of being swept into nothingness. Everything is in place for the descent. All I require from you, Corvo, Billie, is that you not let the Overseers kill me before I can make it.”

 

Black smoke flutters across his skin again. He is about to disappear, Corvo can sense it, pulling his usual theatrics of saying something impossibly ridiculous and fleeing the consequences, so he reaches out and grabs the Outsider’s sleeve. The Outsider looks at him, almost startled.

He almost asks, “Are you serious?” but he knows what the answer would be. “You’re  _ becoming human _ ? That’s your plan?”

 

“I was human once before,” the Outsider says. “And I’ve given my reasoning.”

 

“Your  _ reasoning _ ?” Billie snaps, and her hand snags the Outsider’s collar, dragging him down to the ground. Restrained by the both of them, he almost looks human already, a young man thin to wasting being interrogated on his latest misadventure with the law by the Royal Protector. “What does that even mean? Do you just expect to start living a normal human life after all the people you’ve screwed over the centuries?”

 

“I-”

 

Emily says, tone wavering between disbelief and horror, “Will you still have your powers? I mean, you’re a  _ god _ . Am I going to have a god as one of my Imperial subjects?”

 

“Will we still have  _ our  _ powers?” Billie’s grip is tightening; her voice is remarkably controlled for someone so obviously itching to punch the Outsider in the face. “And what do you mean by properly prepared human body?” She draws back. “Are you talking about one of us? The Marked?”

 

An uncomfortable wave of nausea wrings Corvo’s stomach. “That’s why,” he says, understanding. “That’s why you had me-”

 

The black sleeve and collar rip from their grasps before he can finish and the Outsider, eyebrows raised above black pits, fades into the shadows of Corvo’s office, calling a last, “I suggest you start with Sokolov,” before he is gone completely. He has answered none of their questions. Of course.

 

Corvo rocks back on his heels. His daughter is staring at the spot where the Outsider just was, and he wonders exactly what she’s thinking. Her first meeting with the god she knows Marked him. He expects a spark of fascination, something like what he felt the first time he was drawn into the Void, but when he meets her eyes, he sees only wariness, even disdain. “Well,” he says.

 

“I have leads I can follow up,” Billie says. All business again, not even a second spared for the emotions she was fighting to rein in shortly before. She pulls her hood back over her head. “I can find the friends of the Overseers I questioned earlier. Question them, too, or just tail them. You go after the Royal Physician.”

 

He nods. The pattering rain is growing louder outside; Billie slips her mask back over her face and is gone the way she came. It occurs to him that this is another gift the Outsider bestows upon his Marked: the ability to leave the same way he does, to Blink from a room and avoid facing awkward conversations. A pity he’d be hanged if he ever tried it in regular company.

 

“Who was she?” Emily asks. She has collected herself from her uncertainty in the face of the Outsider. “Billie, he said her name was.”

 

“It doesn’t matter.” He has the urge to tell Emily that this doesn’t concern her, to go to her room and sleep while he takes care of the Overseers, but it isn’t true and he can tell from the way she is drawing herself up that she is about to declare intentions to assist them somehow. She’s the Empress. She is trained to take charge. “Em, you should find the High Overseer. Call at her office, insist on seeing her. She wanted to meet with you tomorrow in any case. I have no doubt she knows what her Overseers are doing.”

 

“I’ll go at once.” Emily turns to his office door, then back to him. “Good luck finding Sokolov,” she says. “He did say he was going to be working tonight, but you never know. He could already be passed out in a bar in the lower districts.”

 

“Thanks,” Corvo says.

 

~

 

As is well-known amongst his patronage, Anton Sokolov keeps a spacious, well-staffed house on Kaldwin’s Bridge, one of the few buildings along the bridge left completely untouched during the plague by virtue of its owner’s stubbornness along with his scientific prowess. Since shortly after the curing of the plague, however, Sokolov has maintained a small laboratory within Dunwall Tower itself, and it is to this that Corvo descends first in hopes of finding him.

 

The lab is housed within what used to be the old torturer’s chambers, former home of Morris Sullivan before he was found dead on the same night as Hiram Burrows. Corvo has never liked the room, even after the bloodstains were mostly scrubbed from the basement floor - it is at least well-lit now, a requirement for scientific study. He peers around the twisting staircase as he walks downwards, spying equipment through an iron-barred railing. There is always a suspiciously large pile hiding from view the spot where Corvo recalls he found an Outsider shrine when he came down here eight years ago.

 

The shrine is not still there. Even Sokolov isn’t that stupid. But he has refrained from putting tables or instruments or crates on the patch of floor where it once stood, treating it as sacred ground. A bed and stained mattress lie opposite the spot, for the nights when Sokolov - or Piero, who used to frequently visit this lab as well - cannot be bothered getting home to the comfort of his own rooms.

 

Someone  _ is _ there tonight, Corvo sees rounding the bend and stepping down into the lab proper. Unfortunately, he sees just as quickly that it isn’t Sokolov who stands holding a scalpel to a specimen, but a woman.

 

She half-turns to him, knife catching the light. “He isn’t here.”

 

Sokolov’s research assistant, he recalls belatedly, his newest and currently longest-lived. Her name is Millie Ryers. “Do you know where Sokolov is, then?” he asks.

 

“Oh, Lord Protector.” Ryers drops her scalpel with practiced ease and faces him completely. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realise it was you. I don’t have a clue where he is at the moment.” She clucks her tongue. “He  _ was  _ here earlier, but then he was dragged away.”

 

“By whom?”

 

Ryers’ face is less pleasant full-on than in profile, her doughy cheeks and sharp features giving the impression of an assemblance of razor-edged crags rising from a deep rockpool. Given Sokolov’s predilection for womanising, it is likely one of the reasons that she has stayed as long as she has that she is not attractive enough to catch his eye. “Bunch of Overseers,” she says. “They practically kidnapped him. He isn’t fond of Overseers, is old Sokolov, but they told him they wanted his help. God knows with what.”

 

“Do you know where they took him?” Corvo asks, pulse quickening.

 

“I would’ve said so if I did,” Ryers replies. She picks up her scalpel again. “I don’t. Not for certain. But I did hear one talking coming down the stairs, making a bloody lot of noise so they sounded more official and intimidating, and I think I heard him say the old Abbey.”

 

That said, she turns her back on Corvo and resumes digging through the guts of her specimen, a clear dismissal. Ryers has certainly never been one to toady to authority. He doesn’t mind the lack of courtesy tonight and towards him; it is an easy opportunity to Blink back up the stairs while she isn’t watching.

 

~

 

It is seven o’clock now, and lightning strikes the sea through a pitch-black sky as Corvo swings out of his window upstairs. He is wearing his mask, stitched skull hiding his face from the storm, and he has the box containing the Heart in his jacket over his heart.

 

It spoke to him while he was slipping on fresh gear, from the ebony and driftwood box that he has kept locked away since it first whispered to him of the coming end, and it said,  _ Be careful, Corvo _ . Nothing new, nothing but a repetition of an earlier message, but it unnerves him just the same. He squeezes it gently, pointing it across the city’s rooftops aimed at the High Overseer’s office, where his daughter will have arrived by now.

 

_ They are keeping her waiting _ , the Heart whispers.  _ Empress Emily, resplendent in imperial dress and armed to the teeth, and they are keeping her waiting. The High Overseer is not in her chambers; she is nowhere they will be able to fetch her before Emily grows tired of waiting. _

 

Then his suspicions are most likely true - High Overseer Drew is part and parcel of the ritual her clergy are to perform.

 

He takes his hand away from the Heart. It is nearly cold enough for the rain to turn to sleet, the closest Dunwall gets to snow except in rare occasions, and the air smells like ozone and salt, crackles with electricity. A running headstart and a short Blink gets him across from the tower to a tall building past the walls, but only a short Blink. He has not recovered fully from his reckless power-usage earlier.

 

The storm, too, is playing havoc with his powers. His hand fizzles briefly on release; there is a cracking noise and a flash of blue light that does not come from him. Billie has landed on the roof with him from the other direction.

 

“The Abbey,” she says shortly. Rain streams off her hood and off the nose of the mask that muffles her voice. They are both masked as they were when they first met now - if it was their first meeting. Perhaps she was there when he spared Daud all those years ago. Corvo hasn’t asked and does not intend to. “Underneath it, I think.”

 

“Those tunnels were supposed to be sealed off,” Corvo informs her, then sighs. “Sokolov has been kidnapped. Again,” he adds wryly. “They’ve taken him to the Abbey. And the High Overseer isn’t at home.”

 

She doesn’t ask how he knows the latter. “Then we go to the Abbey. After we go to Sokolov’s house first. I saw more Overseers leaving there, and it isn’t too far out of our way. He told me they won’t finish until midnight.”

 

“He…?”

 

“Is worried for his own skin and speaking plainly to me for a change,” Billie says. “We should still be quick.”

 

_ She prefers to work alone _ , the Heart chimes. Corvo starts, a tiny gesture that catches Billie’s attention. “Is something wrong?”

 

“No.”  _ But she does not mind working with you. It reminds her of the old days, with  _ him.  _ Before she betrayed him to the witch who tried to become Empress and was banished for her trouble. There are more things in the dark than you know, Corvo.  _ “Let’s go.”

 

~

 

Traveling to Kaldwin’s Bridge in the fast-falling rain proves more difficult than anticipated, mostly on account of their fluctuating powers. Corvo slips once or two on slick slate roofs, and Billie bangs her knee and nearly loses a glove missing a Blink to a next rooftop, her whole body hitting a wall as she desperately scrabbles for purchase with her hands. Corvo pulls her back up and receives a nod for his trouble.

 

Luckily for the both of them, Sokolov’s house is not nearest the side of the river which would necessitate crossing the steel and stone heights of the main bridge itself. He wouldn’t have gone if it had - too much chance of slipping off into the river. The water wheel below the building is churning a tempest tonight; all the glass on the top greenhouse where Sokolov was the evening Corvo kidnapped him is frosted over with cold, and the door is locked. Corvo wipes mist from the door’s window and peers inside, seeing nothing but plants and an empty cell stacked with crates.

 

“The Overseers I saw were coming out the front, anyway,” Billie tells him. They descend the outside staircase to the top floor of the main building, gladly huddling away from the rain, though not the cold. The heating is not on, and Corvo sees immediately that Sokolov’s bed is unmade, indeed stripped and the mattress sliced open. He throws open the doors to the corridor outside the chambers.

 

Billie eyes the books thrown from shelves, some riffled through and then stepped on with muddy boots. “Ransacked,” she says. “Have they ever done this to him before? I’d heard the Royal Physician was interested in the Outsider, but that he was left alone for some reason or other.”

 

There is glass underfoot, too, from smashed phials and magnifiers. “He keeps his actual worshipping and more devoted studies better hidden than you might expect,” Corvo says. “And curiosity in spiritual matters can be expected from a natural philosopher. Anton Sokolov helped build this city as it is today. Many people tolerate many things from him for the sake of his knowledge.”

 

“Their tolerance appears to be at an end.” Billie heads out of the room, making for the stairs to the next floor down. He follows her.

 

Corvo has not visited Sokolov’s residence in many years, but the main floor of his house has not changed much. Thick piping runs overhead, carrying whale oil to the multiple - currently deactivated - security devices and even more numerous scientific contraptions. There was a miniature wall of light here; the space is now occupied by a large rosewood table on which is set a model of Dunwall. He goes over and looks more closely at it. Paper plans of the city are on the floor by the table, and thin lines representing nothing Corvo knows is there in reality are drawn connecting major points of the city.

 

“Monorail,” he reads the diagram’s label aloud. He looks at Billie, who shrugs. Whatever this is, Sokolov hasn’t yet come forward to the Empress with it.

 

Amongst the other things on the workshop floor are sketches for the promised portrait of himself and Emily, Overseer devices enclosed in glass on plinths, and a high number of essays and other reading on whale biology. Between the pages of one book is the draft of a letter to an unnamed slaughterhouse informing the manager that Sokolov will soon be visiting them. Trust him to forego asking permission entirely.

 

“There’s nothing down here that the Overseers would want,” Billie says. She sounds quite unimpressed by the home of the Royal Physician, all in all. “They’ve raided the library upstairs and probably found what they wanted.”

 

He is staring at a spot on the floor where he remembers a painting being when he was last here, a portrait from the rear of a fair-haired woman in a cream-coloured suit whom he later learned was Lydia Boyle. She was dressed in white that night, too, and he has always been thankful that it wasn’t black. Jessamine died in black.

 

“Corvo?”

 

“If they’d found what they wanted, why would they need to take Sokolov himself?” he says, snapping from his reverie.

 

Billie says, “They were still searching when he was kidnapped. Besides, they might still need him for some part of it. The ritual. We don’t know exactly what they’re doing because  _ he _ still loves keeping secrets.”

 

As if on cue, as if summoned by their speaking of the devil, the secret-keeper is back in the room with them as if he had never gone, and Corvo is getting quite tired of the Outsider’s recent habit of popping in and out of their world like a rat peeping out of a hole. “Have you looked upstairs?”

 

“Of course we have,” Billie snaps at him.

 

The Outsider frowns. His usually languid posture is tensed, thoroughly uncomfortable; he is higher in the air, his feet refusing to touch the floor. Distaste for Sokolov and his home, perhaps. “I happen to know there is a secret compartment in the bedroom,” he says. “There is-”

 

“A rune in there, I know,” Corvo says. “I could hear it. The compartment is too small to fit anything else in it, like books, so I didn’t mention it,” he adds to Billie. “You’re probably right. The Overseers found what they were looking for and left and even if they didn’t, they’re sure to be able to torture it out of Sokolov. We got the name of our person of interest out of him within an hour last time.”

 

“Last time?”

 

“Never mind.” He turns his face from Billie’s sharply inquisitive gaze and looks instead to the Outsider, who is doing his best impression of a five-year-old Emily denied a second slice of cake. “Why are you here?”

 

“I was trying,” the Outsider says. “To help. Given that I am forced to rely entirely on the two of you right now, I thought it best to assist you with your search of this house as much as I could.” He raises one eyebrow at Corvo. “Apparently you have everything… under control.”

 

Trying to help. Not words he has lately ever imagined he would hear the Outsider say sincerely, but then Corvo never imagined he would hear the Outsider declaring affection for him. “Do you know what the Overseers found?” he asks, ignoring the wave of conflicting emotions that sweep across him at the thought of  _ that _ .

 

“They were here to search for the details of a binding ritual, similar to the one Aidan Thresh attempted.” The Outsider presses his wrists together in mock helplessness. “They want to tie my hands behind my back and toss me overboard into the coming waves. Ingenious of them. They never would’ve thought of something like this before Olivier Drew took their helm.”

 

“You mean the High Overseer,” Billie says knowingly. “Supposed to be the most spiritually observant person in the Isles. It figures that the latest one would be about as true to that as I hear the last ones were.”

 

Privately, Corvo doubts that anybody could be less observant of the Strictures than Thaddeus Campbell, who had broken every one of them once a day for a joke, and the Outsider unexpectedly validates him by shaking his head. “Oh, no,” he says. “She’s a true believer. The most dangerous of things. That woman genuinely wants to destroy me and she doesn’t even realise that by doing so she’ll be destroying her own purpose and that of everything she stands for. But what could you expect from someone who exposed her own failings for the world to see out of piety?”

 

Corvo says, “And a want for power,” because he remembers what the Outsider is referring to, the day after High Overseer Drew’s election when she had publicly decried her own past as a secretive drunkard, something which certainly would have prevented her from taking that office. She had used it as a rallying point, claiming that the Strictures had rescued her from the depth’s of the Outsider-cursed bottle and declared that she would become a role model for all from that day forth - a born politician, he had thought sourly back then.

 

The Outsider smiles, his teeth sharp. “No High Overseer is ever without that.” He purses his lips and glances towards the stairs to Sokolov’s chambers. “Did you see a book near Sokolov’s bed called Summons of the Thirteenth Month, by any chance?”

 

“Yes. A work of fiction, isn’t it?”

 

“Not all of it.”

 

Billie’s eyes narrow with satisfaction. “I thought so,” she says. “I’ve read that book, too. It was too… familiar. Too close to the truth. Near his bed?”

 

They troop back upstairs, the Outsider actually deigning to follow them by levitating himself up the incline, and Billie finds the book he named amongst the jumble of them, a blue-covered paperback volume with a stylised picture of a calendar on it. “It’s trash,” she says to Corvo, who nods. He would expect nothing less of Sokolov’s taste in popular literature.

 

“But it contains a fairly accurate description of a chant that will lessen the effects of the Overseers’ ritual, if they complete it,” the Outsider says. “Of course, we would need a witch to perform it properly.”

 

Corvo does not miss the look he gives Billie, nor the hard glower she shoots back. “That could be a problem,” she says. “Since none of us are witches. Excluding the magic our Marks give us.”

 

“If our dear Empress only hadn’t killed your potential assassin, Corvo,” and now the Outsider has two dark, dirty looks directed at him. “Never mind. The Overseers may well have captured someone who will suit the purpose if it comes to that. Sokolov wouldn’t need much prompting to turn that way, certainly.”

 

Tucking the book into her jacket, Billie stands from her stoop and takes a last inventory of the room around them. Her shoulders are tense, maybe from the Outsider’s unspoken suggestion which has reminded Corvo how little he knows about her. She lives in Morley, she betrayed Daud, and she might have been a witch, once. He again has the thought that he will be glad when she is long out of Dunwall.

  
A strong tang of ozone and burning flashes to Corvo’s nostrils: a lightning strike outside. “Let’s go,” he says, and with a cynical flourish worthy of the Outsider, “The Abbey awaits.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so............ i made it? this is the longest thing i've ever written or completed (more than 5 times longer than the previous longest) and i am so happy that it's come together so well and that i had fun writing it... thank you sm to everyone who's read and commented. i am very tired and gay and already have tentative plans for other things set in this au (fic about billie's marking is the most solid one rn >:)) but i'll probably be holding off on writing any more dishonored fic besides one piece i've already planned until after i play dishonored 2 (at least twice lmfao)
> 
> again thank you... to all readers. thank you and i hope you enjoy this

It would be Emily’s bedtime by now, were this several years ago. It would’ve passed her bedtime even in the present if this evening had gone to plan, and been a quiet night - hot milky tea brought to her room by servants, her clothes chosen and pressed for the morning meeting, the stars shining bright against the great cloth drape of the sky.

 

Instead, there is a tempest. Instead, Emily is crossing her legs and growing more impatient by the second in a cramped marble-walled waiting room on the other side of the city, and her father and his companion are entering the wide paved square which houses the old Abbey of the Everyman.

 

This esteemed building, as any Dunwall guidebook will tell you, is located on the other side of the river from the offices of the High Overseer, and in times past a special boat and boatman had been kept to ferry the High Overseer across the Wrenhaven to visit the Abbey, to preach themselves or to hear others preaching. The Abbey was shuttered during the plague, however, and once two High Overseers in a row were murdered the Overseers found themselves in too much internal turmoil to bother reopening the building for several years. When the current High Overseer was elected, she had had great plans for the building of a new Abbey, but Emily’s unwillingness to divert large amounts of coin towards the venture had wrecked havoc on her schemes - something which Corvo knows well irrevocably influenced her opinion of the Empress. She has always treated Emily with barely concealed contempt since then, like a hostile heathen she is attempting to convert.

 

Regardless, the newest High Overseer turned her attention to the old Abbey after being unable to build a new one. Funds were found for a half-baked restoration; the dark-bricked and imposing building which followers entered through a wooden door recessed between inscriptions of the Strictures was partially transformed by the redoing of the front in a similar white stone to Dunwall Tower. The door was replaced by a pair of unfriendly stone double-doors, one for entering and one for entering, with the sigil of the Abbey cut deep in both, and the well-known warren of tunnels and caverns beneath the building were sealed with concrete, much to Sokolov’s annoyance. Services resumed as soon as work was complete. As far as he knows, High Overseer Drew has not re-instated the boat and boatman to take her across the river to preach her sermons, but it is probably only a matter of time.

 

Corvo hates the place. It might be expected of him to do so, as an agent of the Outsider, but it strikes into him a sense of foreboding that has nothing to do with his Mark. The back of the building was not redone like the front and thus remains a mass of black-brown brick, an ugly rear to a commanding face. Much like the institution as a whole, if one looks deeper than their gilded masks. He has been inside but once since the restoration and has tried to recall none of it.

 

He and Billie tread quietly on the ground before the Abbey. A woman carrying a cloth bag scurries across the edge of the square, exiting into the riverbound street, and then they are the only people here in this urban clearing, surrounded on one side by the characteristic tall houses of the Estate District and on the other by the smaller but wider buildings that mark the fringes of said district.

 

Standing between the rich and the marginally less rich, darkness cloaks the Abbey and insinuates itself down the troughs of the doors’ carved sigils like rivulets of black blood, the spattering rain only adding to the image. Corvo briefly wishes he had a hood like Billie that he could wrap tight around his hair and the back of his neck. “The entrance to the tunnels is past the back of the square,” he says. “The warren, some used to call it.”

 

She nods. They are both looking at the Abbey’s front doors; probably they are both thinking the same thing. “Lead the way.”

 

They walk towards the front of the building, and Corvo moves without a word to the right door and pushes it open, just a crack. The door is not locked and gives surprisingly easily for such a heavy piece of stone; his Mark flares for an instant when he touches it, wind flowing from under his wrist and adding force to the motion. He peers inside.

 

Nothing. The inner hall, with its rows of marked spaces for standing and kneeling and the raised central pulpit, is even darker than the night outside. He can see no further than the pulpit on its dais - he knows there are back-rooms beyond it for preparation and waiting, but shadows hide even their entrances from him. There are no windows in the Abbey’s main hall to let in moonlight.

 

“Nothing,” he says aloud, and shuts the door.

 

The backside of White Cliff Square is owned by the Overseers themselves and has built upon it two crumbling brick outbuildings, neither paid attention to in the refit of the Abbey. Corvo smashes a window in the side of one - he is vaguely surprised that it has not been broken before, but supposes it was replaced when the warren was ostensibly sealed. Billie climbs through after him, stepping onto a stained heap of blankets just underneath the window. She huffs a small sigh.

 

The room of the outbuilding they find themselves in is not occupied now, but it clearly has been at some point in the past. Evidence of past squatting makes itself known as they move into the next room as well, old cans of food and blankets and other left behind belongings strewn across the floor. There is even a bone charm concealed behind a smashed chair, which Corvo retrieves and tucks into his pocket. The Heart is pulsing gently; he refuses to touch it.

 

He finds the door he remembers from the last time he had cause to go into the warren and throws it open. Billie recoils slightly at the sight of the next room - a massive hole in the ground, larger even than the one she took him into days ago that led to the sewers. It is as if the earth has opened its mouth and forgotten to close it, and the sight is made more surreal by the fact that the hole is enclosed on all sides by four perfectly stable walls and a thin concrete border, presumably the remains of its seal. “Is that natural?” Billie asks. “It looks like a sinkhole, or an earthquake fissure. I can’t imagine anybody would bother expending the effort to dig something this big that doesn’t even lead to anywhere.”

 

“It leads somewhere alright,” Corvo says. “Directly under the Abbey. It might’ve been dug when that place was built, but I’m not exactly sure. I think it was supposed to be an extension of the sewer system before the Overseers back then protested at having muck running under their temple.” The irony.

 

He gestures at the hole. Unexpectedly, black smoke issues from it and a nest of rats from the smoke, making his Mark itch. “Didn’t mean to do that,” he says.

 

Billie looks at him, then steps down into the hole, crushing a rat under her boot in the process. The others run squealing past Corvo for the safety and mouldy food smell of the outbuilding’s other rooms. He sighs, and walks into the hole behind Billie.

 

Very shortly after the entrance, the hole develops into a tunnel of stone and densely-packed earth, high enough for Corvo to walk comfortably but narrow enough that his shoulders graze the walls while he moves. They walk single-file and slowly; Corvo bumps into Billie occasionally whenever she stops short, which is frequently. “It’s very dark in here,” she says when he queries her. “You can see, can’t you?”

 

In purple and yellow, but yes, he can see, he admits.

 

“The Outsider decided not to give me any kind of sight powers, unlike you and Daud,” Billie says, with the weight of a long-held grievance. “So I have no idea where the hell I’m walking at the moment. Excuse me if I stumble once or twice.”

 

They walk onwards for another minute before the tunnel widens and curves to the left. Corvo switches off his altered vision when he sees real light coming from a cluster of whale oil lamps, left on the ground in this widened area but unfortunately all just out of reach behind-

 

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says, staring dismayed at the greenish-black brackets and white mid-air sparks of an active Wall of Light. “You’ve got to be  _ kidding _ me. They must have set this up days ago, how long have they been planning this for?”

 

The power cable for the Wall is curled tauntingly around the whale oil lamps behind it. Billie leans forward almost close enough to touch it, squinting in the lamplight. “It goes up into the ceiling of the tunnel,” she says. “We must be beneath the Abbey by now. The power supply will be inside.”

 

“In one of the back rooms.” He couldn’t have known when he looked inside, of course, but Corvo still curses himself. Time has been wasted. “We’ll have to go back out. It’s only a few minutes back up to the surface, then we can come back and go through.”

 

“I’ll stay,” Billie says. “They might notice the Wall has been turned off and send men to check on it. I can take them out before they leave the tunnel.”

 

“But you can’t see. I should-”

 

“I’m staying.” Her voice is firm, but he can hear the faintest quaver in it. She doesn’t want to go into the Abbey. He can’t say he blames her.

 

“Alright,” Corvo says. Billie leans herself against the edge of the tunnel beside the Wall of Light and inclines her head when he adds, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

 

The trip back along the tunnel is faster without her in front of him, though Corvo keeps to a brisk walk instead of a run. He Blinks up and out of the hole in the outbuilding - he misses the first time and tumbles back down, leaving streaks of grey-ish dirt on his pants - and makes his way swiftly back to the window they entered through, passing his still-summoned rat swarm feasting on an ancient tin of jellied eels. They dissipate into smoke as he steps over them, whispering filling his ears.

 

White Cliff Square is still empty of people outside, and the rain has again turned to sleet. He quickens his pace and finally breaks into a barrelling run for the last metre to the doors of the Abbey. He places a hand on the right door; thunder claps when he pushes it open and strides inside.

 

Corvo switches his altered vision on in the absence of light in the inner hall. The Abbey is rendered in rich purple and black, looking for all the world like an otherworldly shrine to the Outsider. The pulpit looms just above him while he walks down the central aisle, swerving just before it to find the entrance to the back-rooms on the left. He has never been into these rooms, but he knows their rough layout from the plans Emily had to inspect during the refits. Being at the back, they were never changed, and this is immediately evident from the moulding green-and-white wallpaper that assaults his eyes when he shuts the door of the main prep area behind him.

 

There is a lamp on in here. He wills off his altered vision and turns up his nose at the wallpaper and the bare furniture - wooden chairs, an ugly desk holding a stack of Stricture pamphlets and a yearly calendar and a small kettle, and an incongruously handsome hat-stand of ebony wood. An Overseer’s coat is hung on it. Nearby, from another room, Corvo can hear the quiet humming of an active whale oil tank holder; he follows the noise.

 

A tiny hallway lies outside this back-room with two other doors, one with a plaque on it naming it as the High Overseer’s office. He considers peeking inside, then decides against it, entering the other room.

 

From the looks of it, this last chamber is mostly used for storage, boasting cabinets and cupboards shoved against every wall, most piled with boxes on top up to the ceiling. Two cabinets have been pushed aside to make space for an oil tank holder, its rusted metal shape very out of place here. Corvo sees a thin hole in the floor, perfectly drilled, through which the power cable for the Wall of Light below runs.

 

He tests the tank holder’s safety shield for a lock, and is eminently thankful to find it open. He hadn’t thought of that before he came back up. Under the shield, the whale oil tank is half-full with the thick sludgy stuff, shining bright white in the storage room’s own dim lighting. Corvo pulls it out and rests it on the floor, then thinks twice and opens one of the cupboards, placing it gently on top of a stack of moth-eaten pamphlets. He shuts the cupboard and turns around.

 

In the doorway, there is a figure, outlined by the brighter light from the prep room. Corvo’s blade is in his hands before he realises who it is.

 

“What are you doing here?” he says, astonished, to Cecelia.

 

His best agent is dressed in dark clothing, a dirt-brown vest over a black shirt and pants, her hair plastered in wet curls against her scalp, and she looks almost as surprised to see him as he is to see her. “I’ve been tailing Overseers all day,” she says, moving closer. Her thin form blocks out the light streaming through the tiny hallway. “There was unusual movement around the Abbey, so when I saw someone going in I thought-”

 

“They’re underneath us,” Corvo says. “The warren was unsealed.”

 

Cecelia’s eyes widen. Her right hand grasps her left, unconsciously. “It’s to do with him, isn’t it? This storm. All these odd things that’ve been happening. What are the Overseers doing?”

 

“It’s complicated.” He hesitates, then frowns. “Have you been using your Mark? I didn’t hear you come in at all.”

 

“Not… intentionally?” She looks nervous at that. “It’s something about the Abbey, I think. They soundproofed the back rooms to make sure that nothing would disturb the preaching and all that in the main hall. At least, that’s what I read in that book about it last year. You can’t really hear footsteps on the floors.” She stamps her foot hard on the ground to demonstrate; it makes the faintest muffled noise instead of the heavy thump he would expect.

There is a low creaking afterwards, and for a ridiculous moment Corvo is afraid the Abbey is going to fall down around them or that they are going to fall through the floor. Wouldn’t that be a way to burst in on High Overseer Drew. “Cecelia, you should get out of here. You don’t want to be seen with me tonight.”

 

“Of course,” Cecelia says. “Are you sure you- No, you don’t want help. I’ll at least wish you good luck.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

She turns, bowing her head in farewell to him, and walks back through the prep room door, closing it after her. Corvo glances shortly around the storage room for any other signs of recent Overseer activity. Seeing nothing, he is about to follow Cecelia when he hears her from the other room, a surprised yell that sends his blood pumping.

 

In three strides, he has thrown open the closed door. Cecelia is on her knees, nose bloodied from a punch. Two Overseers stand at the exit to the main hall; one is half in front of the other, rubbing his fist with his other hand. The prep room’s lamp picks out the scornful expression on his gold mask.

 

“Heretic scum,” the first Overseer says, then looks up at Corvo and jerks back in shock. “You’re - what the hell! It’s the Masked Felon!”

 

His blade is again at hand, unfolded with a flourish, but before he can cut the man’s throat a violent and familiar throbbing begins to fill the world. Creaking echoes through the air. Cecelia screams, a raw sound that pierces Corvo’s eardrums and rattles his teeth in combination with the unearthly music. He hadn’t seen the device strapped to the chest of the second Overseer; he can barely see it now, just the man’s hand cranking, gilt-edged coat cuffs catching the light beyond the main hall’s darkness.

 

He hears one of them say, “She has the brand, too,” and the other “The High Overseer will be pleased. Now we will be on time,” and rushes forward at the two Overseers. The first steps aside, and the one with the device thrusts it forward, catching Corvo in the stomach with its edge. Pain erupts from his gut and paradoxically from his hand, and the first Overseer brings his fists down on Corvo’s head, hard.

 

The last thing he sees is his Mark burning gold on his hand, then flickering out.

 

~

 

Grey swirls around him, vibrant shades of black and white and dark mixing to create the colour of death. The roar of the sea is deafening, overpowering all other sound, and there is no ground beneath him, only a stream of broken pieces of earth and glass and stone at the edges of his vision. He falls, towards a sun so bright that it has turned back in on itself, a glowing white light that screams.

 

The Mark burns. It feels as if all the skin is being stripped from his hand. The Outsider is not here. He isn’t anywhere - the Void is again empty, and so it will stand for the rest of time, while all human civilisation crumbles to dust and rises up anew, Corvo thinks as he falls, falls, falls-

 

There is a plucking sensation, like strings on his arms and legs and the back of his neck have been cut all at once.

 

He screams.

 

~

 

“Wake up!”

 

The voice is demanding, querulous, familiar.

 

Corvo’s eyes open slowly. His wrists are tied excruciatingly tight with rope, the knot of a man who is familiar with a ship’s rigging. Cecelia is beside him on her knees; her hands are tied too, from the looks of it.

 

He sees lamps. Hundreds of whale oil lamps, dotted around a cavern almost the width and length of the Abbey’s main hall. Great hunks of stone and boulders are scattered near the walls of the cavern, giving the impression that dividing tunnel walls have been smashed in to create this larger space, but that can’t be. The Abbey would’ve been brought down on top of this place, surely.

 

The other things that Corvo notices about the cavern he has woken up in immediately are the smell - foul and rancid, rotten food and animal blood and offal mixed with the wet scent of sewer caverns - and the Overseers in it. There are perhaps twenty, maybe more that he can’t see behind him, all gold-masked and armed. The one closest to him carries a device on his chest, and his hand is fixed ready on the crank.

 

“Are you awake? Good,” the voice says. There is a huge boulder about fifteen feet from him, flat-topped and laid out with items that Corvo cannot quite make out from his current position, and from behind this boulder comes the person he was expecting to see here, dragging a bloodied Anton Sokolov by the scruff of his neck.

 

High Overseer Drew is pale. “Masked Felon,” she says. “Finally, we will be able to rid this city of you, and be rid of a filthy agent of the Outsider at the same time. I didn’t realise you were one of them, but in hindsight it seems obvious. Only a disgusting heretic would carry out assassinations like you did eight years ago.” She drops Sokolov, who falls forward onto his face with a grunt. “Overseers. We will see his face.”

 

There isn’t anything he can do to stop them. The mask comes off with treacherous ease in their hands; he can see Cecelia looking horrified at his side.

 

“No fucking way,” one of the Overseers says, sounding equally horrified. He covers his mouth with a gloved hand. “Beg pardon, High Overseer. The shock-”

 

Drew slaps her fist into her other hand with a harsh noise. She is no longer pale. Colour is drawn high on her cheekbones, and a vicious glint is present in her eyes, her mouth a sneer. “ _ Royal Protector _ . It was you all along.”

 

“What do you think you’re doing, High Overseer Drew?” Corvo says wearily. “You’ve gathered a force beneath the Abbey to perform some kind of heretical ritual for the purposes of who-knows-what. Isn’t this exactly the sort of thing you should be calling your own order down to stop? Shouldn’t you all be hanged as heretics?”

 

“If, by tarnishing myself, Corvo Attano, I can destroy the thing that the Abbey of the Everyman was founded to fight against,” Drew retorts, drawing a short-sword from inside her red velvet coat. “Then I will do whatever is necessary to achieve the end of the Outsider’s vile reign.” She slides the flat of the sword across her hand, then points it at him in an oddly theatrical gesture. Drew has never struck him as a person given to shows of force, but then he would never have thought she would ever be the sort of High Overseer to do something like  _ this _ . “I will spill my blood and yours, if need be.”

 

He tries to pull on his Mark briefly, eyeing the Overseer near him with a device, and finds to his horror that he can feel no response from it at all, not even the dull ache of mana drain. “What will happen to the Abbey when its reason for being is gone, High Overseer?”

 

“The Abbey will always have a reason for being. Once your god is erased from existence, our role will become that of a more peaceful shepherd to the flock of the Empire, guiding the people’s spiritual health. Helping them to live productive lives, free of the tyranny of black magic.” She pauses, wipes her lips free of spittle. “It will be midnight soon. Then you’ll see.”

 

She turns on her heel back to the boulder and after a moment, he can hear the low murmurs of her speaking to another Overseer.

 

In the almost silence of the cavern, Corvo has time to assess. His hands are bound tightly enough that he can barely move them at all. The comforting pressure of his sword and the other blades in his shoes is missing, and in fact his feet are completely bare for some reason. He looks down.

 

The cavern floor under him is painted with a dark reddish liquid, blood from the smell of it, forming the curves of a circle adorned with arcane symbols. He is on the edges of the circle, but still inside it, as is Cecelia.  _ Cecelia- _ “Are you alright?” he says, keeping his voice low.

 

“Yes.” She is whispering. “They hit me, but I can take it.”

 

“Do you know why they took my shoes?”

 

“No. Mine, too. They’ve been quiet since I woke up. They were waiting to talk to you.” Cecelia cranes her head towards him. “I’m sorry they took your mask. If we get out of this-”

 

“That’ll be my problem,” Corvo says. He wriggles his hands in the rope, tries again to coax a response out of his Mark. “And we will get out of this. Trust me.”

 

An Overseer looks at them, and he stops talking. The gold-masked man holds up a finger and draws it across his own throat slowly; his fellow beside him snickers. Most of the Overseers in the room have an eye or both on them when Corvo observes them. They are standing or sitting, fiddling with their swords, three grouped at the edges of the cavern reciting the Strictures. They are waiting. For midnight, he assumes. He can’t tell what time it is right now without a clock or seeing the night sky.

 

He feels as if he’s forgotten something. It comes to him with a jolt when one of the Overseers calls in a high voice, “High Overseer Drew, should we bring the other two now?”

 

_ Billie. _

 

“Yes,” Drew answers. She comes back out from behind the boulder-altar, eyes staring daggers at Corvo and Cecelia. “Bring the other heretics. They can all become acquainted before their souls are cast into the Void.”

 

Billie was at the Wall of Light when he was in the Abbey - theoretically, she should have stopped the Overseers who came out to find the two of them, unless they weren’t in this cavern originally. Or unless she was captured. Or, and it is this thought that heavies his heart even further, unless she left. Maybe she has decided that enough is enough, that she should cut her losses and hide away until the Outsider is dead and she can flee back to Morley. He thought she was the kind of person who would see things through no matter what, but he hasn’t known her very long.

 

From the shadows, two people bound in the same manner as him are dragged. One is a woman, sallow-skinned and hard-eyed and gagged in addition to her tied wrists, and the other is a man with coal-black hair and scars scratched thick through his lips. He has the look of a Tyvian, while she might be from any one of the Isles or beyond. Neither of them are Billie, and Corvo is relieved somewhat against his will.

 

The two new captives are forced into the circle with him and Cecelia. The man’s clenched hands almost rub against his. “You’re one too, huh,” he says. His voice is faintly accented, and the Overseer holding him cuffs him when he speaks. “Ow! You fucking mongrel-”

 

“Shut up.” That’s Drew, observing the four of them. “You saved us some time, Royal Protector. We would have had to round up two more heretics of the hundreds in this city if you and your spy hadn’t turned up on our doorstep. These ones gave us enough trouble,” she says curtly, her gaze drifting to the gagged woman, whose face is rigid with contempt. Drew opens her mouth to say something else, but she is interrupted by a tremor shaking through the cavern, a sudden quivering of the stone that makes her lose her footing briefly.

 

Drew rights herself, scanning the cavern, fixing hard on those Overseers who also lost their balance and have taken longer than a moment to stand back up. She shouts, “The earth quakes. The time is nearly come!” and then, turning to Sokolov, still kneeling in front of the boulder, “Anton. If you’d be so kind as to tell the heretics what purpose their deaths will serve, besides the obvious.”

 

Sokolov says, “Olivier,” after a long pause and Drew knees him hard in the shoulder. “Anton,” she hisses at him. “I won’t hesitate to throw you in the fire with the rest of your kind. I consider it a disgrace that none of my predecessors ever investigated you for your obvious inclinations.  _ You _ were the one who profaned this place, weren’t you?”

 

Sokolov’s voice is raspier than Corvo has ever heard it, his lips cracked and bleeding and his eyebrows drawn in impotent anger. “You have no right to judge me anymore,” he says. “You’ll go down for this, Olivier.” He raises his head to look at Corvo. “The ritual tonight is a binding. One I’ve long avoided. Through the death of four chosen heretics within one specially appointed spot painted with the appropriate runes in the blood of a slaughtered heifer, the Outsider can be held in an equivalent place in the Void, unable to use his powers. He can be summoned from there by the ritual performer but he cannot-”

 

“Escape,” Drew says. “We have interpreted the signs, with the help of Anton’s disgusting library. The Outsider is being overwhelmed by the devouring force of the Void as is prophesied in some of these books. We will make sure he dies to it.”

 

Another tremor rocks the cavern briefly; Corvo cannot hear the rain here underground but he is sure it is still falling outside, stronger than ever. He thinks of Emily, sitting in the High Overseer’s office, waiting for a woman who will never come because she is standing in front of him overseeing his death, and the Heart beats in time with his.

 

He’d forgotten he still has it. They didn’t search him for anything besides weapons, it seems, or maybe the Heart is invisible to everyone but him. He is glad they didn’t take it. It warned him about all this, all those nights ago, and he wonders if it will burn up with him once they set him alight, if Jessamine’s spirit will finally be free in the same moment his is.

 

No, he can’t think like that. He isn’t finished yet.

 

Drew nods, and Overseers start bringing out kindling from the shadows of the cavern, bundles of wood cut thick and thin and laying it just outside the bloody circle, surrounding the four of them with the promise of fire. There are whale oil tanks too, white oil luminous in the lamplight. One is placed before each of them, full to the brim.

 

“Thank you,” Cecelia whispers to him. “If we don’t get out of this, thank you, Corvo.” She hesitates, then adds, “And if we do, I wouldn’t mind a bonus.”

 

“You’ll have it,” he whispers back as one of the Overseers stands back and readies his weapon. He points it at the oil tank in front of Corvo, masked face completely implacable, eyes shadowed and unreadable.

 

A third quake ripples through this wide stone space, the strongest one yet. Sokolov slumps to the side and falls over, his cheek smashing against rock. He grunts, eyes fixed on Corvo, then again when Drew nudges his prone body out of the way with her foot. She stands before the huge boulder; she does not raise her arms or gesture in any way, but something in her face has changed. Her expression is resolute, triumphant. “Midnight,” she calls.

 

In the darkest shadow of the cavern, near the entrance to the left, Corvo sees something move.

 

“Midnight,” Drew repeats stridently. “The time is here to finally remove the stain of black magic from our lives, Overseers. The time is come!”

 

At her final word, the Overseer in front of Corvo fires his pistol, and the oil tank explodes with enough force to send splashes of hot oil burning across Corvo’s whole body. The kindling at the edge of the circle catches fire.

 

“The time is come!”

 

The Overseer in front of Cecelia fires. More hot oil, and a yell from the other Marked, the man, a fearful cry as the wood fire flares up like Corvo’s Mark these last few weeks. He cannot feel it now, and he suspects that he may never again. A string has been cut; something has been severed, something has been lost.

 

“The time is come!”

 

Another pistol shot.

 

Cecelia is weeping silently from pain, hot whale oil dribbling down her neck and leaving raw red burns, but her hands are moving in their bonds. She might be able to get one free, if oil burnt up the rope, if oil burnt up the rope around his hands-

 

Through the rising flames, the shadow Corvo saw a minute ago resolves itself into a short, red-coated figure wearing a whaler’s gas mask and carrying a short-sword in its hand, and stabs an Overseer through the throat from the back. The man gasps, suffocating on his own blood, and the figure runs - not Blinks - to the next closest man and brings the sword down in a brutal slice from shoulder to gut. He yells.

 

The fourth pistol shot does not ring out, because Drew turns at the shout, confusion evident on her face, then pure rage. “Overseers! An intruder!”

 

Even without transversal at her disposal, Billie Lurk moves faster than anybody Corvo has ever seen. She crosses the cavern, her sword flashing and cutting a bloody stripe across the chest of the first man who tries to grab at her and then she is in front of the circle of Marked. She reaches into her jacket. Her mask is illuminated by the crackling flames, making her look like the demons Overseers preach all agents of the Outsider to be, her hood is slick with rain, and she pulls out a book.

 

The chant the Outsider talked about to lessen the effects of this ritual. He’d forgotten. It doesn’t seem possible now that a few words can stop the earth shaking under them, and Billie doesn’t get the chance to try. Drew lunges at her, her large hands shoving Billie’s arm. The book goes flying towards the boulder-altar. So does Billie’s sword. The hilt scudders on the stone floor.

 

“You will  _ not _ ,” Drew says shrilly. She draws her sabre and jabs the point towards Billie’s gut, and there are other Overseers closing on her, sabres out and ready to slit the throat of this newest-arrived heretic.

 

Billie dodges away from the sword’s end. Corvo can see her assessing the situation, can see her deciding that she is drastically outnumbered and needs to do something right now. He can see Cecelia struggling with her rope bonds still, her hands nearly free. He can see Sokolov, jerked into attention by the book landing near him, using his shoulder to push himself back onto his knees and crying, “ _ The circle! _ ”

 

Billie darts forward before the Overseers can reach her through the rising circle of fire and kicks Corvo square in the chest with incredible force.

 

He goes flying back, barrelling into the other Marked man behind him, the both of them toppling outside the boundaries of the runed blood-painted circle-

 

~

 

And then Corvo isn’t in the cavern under the Abbey anymore.

 

He is standing, with shoes on his feet and his sword at his side, before the gazebo on the grounds of Dunwall Tower. It floats a few metres out of reach on a cobblestone island, surrounded not by violent grey turmoil but sky a soft, robin’s egg blue. It looks older than he knows it is. More weathered, its paint scratched and its roof re-tiled. A rowing boat is completely still above him. He cannot hear the rain, but he knows it must still be there.

 

“Hello, Corvo.”

 

He allows himself a small, tentative smile at the sight of the Outsider appearing in the same place he first met him, blocking the gazebo from view. Corvo has already seen what lies there - not Jessamine’s bloodied body this time. It is her tomb, inscription tarnished from a hundred more years of Dunwall’s sea breeze, but with fresh flowers laid beside it. “Hello.”

 

“Billie has stopped the ritual,” the Outsider says. “You will not be here for more than a few seconds outside the Void.”

 

Corvo gestures at the calm around them, at the gazebo. If he turns around, he thinks he might see the steps leading down to his attic room in the Hound Pits. “What is this place? It’s not grey like when I was here before.”

 

His perhaps soon-to-be-mortal god’s feet are touching the ground lightly. “This is… the last vestige of the Void that is mine,” he says. “My last port of refuge. It won’t be here for very much longer. My powers are almost gone. I have only enough energy to bring you here, and tie up a few loose ends.”

 

“But you’ll still be able to pull off your plan, won’t you?”

 

The blue sky around them is interrupted by a sound like ripping, shredding paper; the gazebo starts to shudder, its metal and wood frame creaking. The flowers on Jessamine’s tomb fly away in a whipping wind, and the Outsider tilts his head. “I will,” he says. “Thanks to all of you,” and as if the Void hears him, their surroundings begin to change. The gazebo is still there, but now it stands on an icy field in Tyvia. It stands in the old Moray mansion. It stands on the shores of Pandyssia, on the edge of a shipyard in Morley, in a tiny room in Dunwall only large enough to house one man.

 

The Outsider says, “But you especially, Corvo. You gave me this idea, after all.”

 

“Me?” Corvo asks. He can feel the pressure of the otherworldly wind on his body now; he fancies his bones are creaking like the gazebo.

 

“When your Empress died.” That black smoke flickers across the Outsider again, showing his skull, showing his flesh. He moves closer to Corvo and raises his voice above the noise of the tempest at his door. “You were a protector to her, Corvo. Her bodyguard, her lover, her friend, and then she was taken from you. You had nobody left to trust. So what did you do? You became a killer.”

 

A piece of the gazebo breaks, a support cracking free. The blue-tiled roof collapses and is borne away on the invisible wind.

 

“You ran with murderers. You spilled blood in gutters, you crawled in the filth and the rats to take your revenge,” said almost directly into Corvo’s ear now. He is close like he was in that room earlier and he is trembling, just a little. “You became something less than you were. To survive. And that is what I am doing now.”

 

He is about to say that becoming human is nothing compared to what he did, but the dam breaks. The blue paper walls of the Outsider’s Void smash apart and there is the tumultuous grey expanse he remembers, there is the all-devouring ball of dark light. Only the stone he stands on remains. He suspects because the Outsider’s feet are touching it, too.

 

Corvo can hear the sea. “It’s nearly over,” he says. “Isn’t it?”

 

The Outsider leans in and kisses him, clinging to him with a very human desperation, and the Void bears down on them both.

 

~

 

It would not be correct to say that Corvo wakes up - rather, he was never unconscious to begin with. The feel of the Outsider’s cold mouth on his is still present, he was in the Void for certain, but now he is back in the cavern and there is a ringing pain in his chest from Billie’s foot connecting with it.

 

“ _ Corvo! _ ”

 

His hand scrapes on gravel. Cecelia is the one who yelled for him. She has a knife in her hands that she pulled from somewhere on her person, a tiny thing barely more than a pocket-knife. Billie leaps from the bloody circle to stand beside her and pivots, facing High Overseer Drew. The flames of the ritual have gone out with no prompting, and Overseers surround all of them, including the other two Marked.

 

“Cut us free, for fuck’s sake,” the man with black hair shouts. Cecelia looks wildly at him, then at Corvo, who nods. She stoops to run her knife through the rope binding his hands and those of the woman, who removes her own gag, but they do not have enough time to stand up before Drew makes a gesture, face pinched with virulent rage.

 

His first instinct is to Blink from the sword thrust that comes at him from behind and above, but his Mark is no longer functional. The sword grazes his neck and hits the ground; Billie knifes his attacker in the neck and grabs Corvo’s arm, pulling him to his feet. “No powers,” she says shortly.

 

“We’ll have to get used to it,” he tells her.

 

The five of them are all up now, four of them armed after the Marked man pulls the sabre from the hand of the Overseer Billie just killed. The Marked woman has settled herself into an unarmed stance, too, and when an Overseer runs at her she punches low, her fist curving in a way that Corvo recognises as the style of someone who usually wears brass knuckles.

 

The sign Drew made has every Overseer in the cavern with a drawn sword. There must be fifteen left after Billie’s kills. Not good odds for the average fighter, but Corvo is not the average fighter, and neither is Billie. “Leave Drew to me,” he says, and steps forward.

 

Two on the left. One he decapitates, blocking his frantic sword blows and ducking a strike that might’ve hit if his fellow hadn’t struck at the same time, the two sabres glancing off each other. These men are fresh; they would have to be if they still have enough respect for the seat of High Overseer to follow her into a pit in the earth to perform heresy. The other Overseer strikes at him again with a cry; Corvo lops off his arm neatly and runs him through, stifling his last sounds of pain.

 

Three on the right. The Marked man is fighting one, although not faring well. His style of swordsmanship reminds Corvo of Emily’s when she is fighting from a book, all technique and no killing intent, no understanding inherent in each blow that when you pick up a sword you should be fighting for your life, no matter what setting or opponent. An Overseer makes a grab for Cecelia and she kicks him in the shin before Billie turns from her own man and cuts his throat.

 

One ahead. The Marked woman gets there before him. Her first blow hits the Overseer in the shoulder and he stumbles back. She must’ve hit a nerve. Corvo moves in and stabs through his heart.

 

Four on the right. He isn’t close enough to get the furthest, but the Marked man takes up his slack, still spattered with blood from killing his first opponent. Billie kills two - one a decapitation, her sword twirling in her hand like his when he does the same move, the second a heavy strike from shoulder to groin. Not all of the Outsider’s powers have left them, it seems. The vitality the Mark grants still runs in Corvo’s veins, energises his sword hand when he cuts down the fourth man.

 

At the head of the cavern by the boulder-altar, Drew is watching them kill her men, her own sabre drawn and out. Sokolov is prone beside her, and the Overseer with a device strapped to his chest is watching them too, his hand hovering over the crank while he stands as if transfixed.

 

One behind. Corvo hears him pull out his pistol rather than sees him; the man fumbles his shot and lets out a strangled cry when Corvo pivots low and lands a sword strike to his gut. He turns back to see that the device Overseer has been driven into action by the yell. His hand drops to the crank and turns furiously, ancient music beginning abruptly in the middle of a tune, swelling and dropping.

 

It does nothing to Corvo. Or Billie, or any of the other Marked. The device Overseer keeps turning the handle more and more frantically, until Corvo is right in front of him, close enough to run his blade across the man’s bare throat and stop his hand turning.

 

The music stops as suddenly as it began. Behind him, Billie is cleaning up one of the last of the men. He is the best swordsman of the lot of them, but she is better, a whirling terror parrying and lunging and nicking his gilded coat with every strike she makes. Corvo watches her out of the corner of his eye while he deals with the other two by himself, ducking and dropping into a slide that catches them both off-balance. His sword pierces the skull of the first man and goes straight through with a sickening crunch; he leans into it with his Outsider-given strength and kills the second man too, driving the blade through both their heads.

 

He pulls his sword out, and there is nobody left. Only the five Marked, and Sokolov, and High Overseer Drew.

 

She makes a strike for him as he stands up, a desperate move. The woman is a religious adherent and a politician, not a sword fighter, though she has passion behind her movement. Corvo has to put a little more force into it than he would expect to slap back her arm with the flat of his own blade and send her sabre flying from her hand, so hard that the hilt buries itself into a thin crevice in the stone ground.

 

“Heretics,” Drew spits. Her face is ashen, her eyes darting from her slewn men to the ruined ritual circle to her sabre. “You  _ scum _ , you  _ filth _ -”

 

He should kill her now. It would be the simplest and best thing to do, to leave Olivier Drew here underground on top of a pile of dead Overseers where she can tell nobody about what she saw and did tonight and then re-seal the warren. Let their blood seep into the stones beneath the Abbey. But- “I’ve killed two High Overseers,” Corvo says to Drew. “I will kill you if you don’t stand down, High Overseer. You can get out of this alive. I’ll even let you keep your position, if you swear to me on your blood that you won’t speak a word of any of this. We both know you’re finished if it gets out that you performed heresies.”

 

Cecelia is beside him, pale-faced and wide-eyed, and Billie steps up to his other side as he wraps up his short speech. She would already have killed Drew, he can tell. “You’re already finished, really,” he says.

 

“I will not surrender to the man who killed High Overseers Campbell and Martin!” A shrill cry. “I defy the Outsider and all who serve him, and if the faithful cannot see that after my death, then I have failed as High Overseer.”

 

_ My death _ -

 

Drew makes a move, a lunge for her sabre. Corvo does not draw his sword; he watches her snap her arms to her side and throw her body down onto the sharpened blade. It impales her through her chest on the left side. She gives a sharp gasp, a mutter that is not audible to any of them, and then slumps, her body slipping slowly down the blade until her chest is flush against the hilt embedded in the ground.

 

Blood drips off Drew’s sabre. Nobody speaks. The five of them are motionless, surrounded by the remains of black magic and massacre, until Cecelia says raggedly, “It’s over, then.”

 

The faintest of tremors shakes the ground and then settles, as if to underscore her declaration. “It is,” Corvo says. He feels like dropping his sword and sitting down for a moment, but there is a corpse close enough that he would be sitting on it.

 

“Thank the Outsider,” the Marked man says, and then keels over. Corvo turns to see Cecelia and the Marked woman holding him just above the ground, blood streaming from a wound in his side.

 

The woman pushes Cecelia’s hands away once she has the man steady. “I will find him medical attention,” she says. Her voice is faintly accented, like his, but with an entirely different cadence, one Corvo recognises as the north edge of Serkonos. “Before I leave this city.” She looks at Corvo, nudging the man’s arm over her shoulder. “Thank you, Lord Protector. You will not see me again.”

 

The two begin a slow walk towards the tunnel leading out of the cavern, passing by the still down and most likely unconscious Sokolov and into the shadows. Corvo himself moves to check Sokolov’s vitals, and finds a healthy pulse. The Royal Physician will certainly live to see another day, though Corvo privately, fervently hopes that the knock to his head will wipe his memory clean of tonight, or at least make it murky. The last thing he needs is Sokolov hassling him even more than the past few weeks.

 

“Cecelia,” he says. “Are you alright?”

 

She nods her assent, kneeling down to palm Sokolov’s forehead and check his vitals for herself. “I’ll get him back to his house,” she says, and then quieter, “I hope you’ll make my next assignment something less dangerous.”

 

“I didn’t assign you to this, but you’ll get your bonus,” Corvo promises her, helping her to her feet with Sokolov’s arms around her back. She stands straighter than she might have in the days when she was a servant at the Hound Pits, her back stronger and her grip tighter, and he is very glad that she is alive and that the Mark on her hand will never cause her harm. “Good night, Cecelia.”

 

“See you later, Corvo,” Cecelia says. She pointedly does not look at Drew’s dead body as she leaves, and then it is just him and Billie Lurk standing amidst a sea of blood and corpses.

 

Billie says, “Did he make it?”

 

“I think so,” Corvo replies.

 

~

 

When they emerge into White Cliff Square, the sky is an inky black but clear, specked with the pinpoint lights of stars, and the rain that was falling so heavily mere hours ago has begun to dry up. The Abbey is a shadow in the dark, eminently more foreboding with the knowledge of what lies under it. Corvo turns his back on it and walks away.

 

Billie walks in the other direction, but she turns to look at him when she reaches the edge of the square, and he turns in response to see her last gesture of farewell. She puts her mask back on before she disappears.

 

His own mask, he leaves in his pocket as he trudges through the unlit streets of his city. He recovered it from Drew’s body shortly before they left. It has never looked more like a skull to him than seeing it drooping from the pocket of a dead woman’s clothes, a metal face held together with stitches that is so familiar to him now that he has seen it in his dreams as his real face more than once. The Masked Felon. The terror of Dunwall.

 

He stumbles briefly on a wet patch of cobblestone, wonders what he would do if someone like Drew ever did reveal him to the city. Probably it wouldn’t matter, in the end. He was exonerated of Jessamine’s murder years ago, and some would say he was only doing what was right, to restore their daughter to the throne. The charge of heresy would be the more serious one, but after tonight, they would have no proof that he has ever been possessed of supernatural powers.

 

The Market District entrance to Dunwall Tower is open when he arrives at it. There are people passing through the gates already, a pair of guards and a small figure being escorted away from a railcar who turns and sees him twenty feet away and cries, “Father!”

 

“Empress,” one of the guards protests, but she has already stripped off her hood and is striding towards him, taking his arm and ushering them all through the gates. Corvo allows himself to be led by his daughter up the paved path to Dunwall Tower’s front doors; he says nothing until they are inside, past the gazebo where the love of his life is entombed.

 

“Emily,” he says. “High Overseer Drew-”

 

“She wasn’t at her office,” Emily says. The tower’s foyer is much warmer inside, more brightly lit than that deep cavern in the earth, and she leads him towards the stairs to his room. He follows gladly, aware that he must smell of blood and smoke and damp. “They made me wait hours, Father, it was ridiculous, while the rainstorm poured down outside. Finally I said if High Overseer Drew wasn’t going to see me, I’d come back tomorrow and see her, when she  _ said  _ she wanted to see me.”

 

His footsteps are muffled on plush carpet for a few steps, then they are in front of his chambers. “Drew is dead,” Corvo says.

 

Emily stares at him. She sighs, and opens the door to his room. “Did you kill her?” she asks. “Is Sokolov-”

 

“Fine. Cecelia took him back to his house. I didn’t kill her,” he assures Emily. Inside, his chambers are exactly as he left them hours ago. He opens the door to the bedchamber and begins searching for a change of clean clothes, something he can wear that isn’t spattered with blood and guts. This is becoming a regular problem lately, and he adds to the questioning look in Emily’s eye, “It’s over, Em. With… him. You can stop worrying about witches for the time being.”

 

“Is he dead?”

 

“No.”

 

Emily grimaces and presses a hand to her temple. “Headache,” she says. “I won’t ask what happened to him. I suppose I should get started on finding a good candidate for High Overseer to endorse now.”

 

“Yul Khulan,” Corvo says from behind his closed bedchamber door. He is also becoming an expert at changing clothes quickly, leaving the stench of death on a pile in the floor. “A prominent clergyman and a good man. But you don’t need to worry about that tonight.” He pops open the door. “You should sleep, Emily. Please. It’s almost three in the morning. We can deal with it all then.”

 

She is wearing very Imperial clothes, slightly wet and muddied from the storm, but she looks like his little girl when she smiles tiredly and says, “Alright. In the morning, then. And you should get some sleep, too, Father.”

 

“Can’t,” he says. “I have somewhere else to be at dawn.”

 

Emily sighs again, smiles. “You’re sure this is all over? What happened to that woman who was here before?”

 

“She’s gone.” He hopes for good, back to Morley. “There won’t be any more storms of unnatural origin. The only thing I can see coming from all this that you might need to worry about is that Sokolov probably knows about my hand.”

 

The hand Emily has pressed to her temple presses harder. “That’s-”

 

“It’s quite alright,” Corvo says, holding up the Mark to show her, flexing his hand. “It’s nothing but an inappropriate tattoo now. There isn’t anything up in the Void for it to call on. Still,” he covers it again by shoving it into his pocket. “I should probably order a few more pairs of gloves.”

 

“Something else to leave til tomorrow,” Emily says, reaching for the door to go. “And we should do it together, to make sure they don’t get the wrong size.” She opens it and turns one last time back to him, eyes bright. “Good night, Father.”

 

He smiles, just a little. “Good night, Emily.”

 

~

 

Over the horizon, the sun is just beginning to rise.

 

Corvo stands on the edge of the river, hands tucked into his pockets, watching the Wrenhaven flow past. There is nobody else here right now, not even the City Watch. Boats form tiny white streaks far out on the water; up above, gulls wheel through the air, more white smudges that would make the river and the sky indistinguishable from each other if one were not red-gold and the other an ugly brown-green.

 

Ten feet out in the river, something erupts from the water and gasps for breath once, twice. It gets its balance, treading river, paddling with its hands like it isn’t used to using its body yet. It isn’t, but it does not take long for the thing to start moving, heading for shore.

 

Corvo watches the body of Levi walk out of the Wrenhaven in silence. The thin red line through his neck where Corvo’s sword bit into it is still there, stark against the clammy white skin - the pallor of a quite literal corpse, but as the body shuffles its way out of the river, he can see blood starting to circulate from a beating heart. The body’s skin pinkens, though it is still very pale, partially from the cold of the water it has been floating in for hours.

 

The body of Levi says, in a voice that is familiar but different at the same time, a midpoint between the high and reedy tone Corvo heard from Levi before he died and that other, eerie voice, “Hello, Corvo.”

 

“You made it, then,” Corvo says, as if it isn’t obvious, but he wants to hear him say it.

 

Levi’s nose was crooked, he recalls. It isn’t anymore, and his cheekbones are higher, his face more defined, like someone has reached down and remoulded his bones to fit their own purpose. His eyes are closed. “I did,” the Outsider says, and opens his eyes and smiles at Corvo.

 

A hideous chill goes down Corvo’s spine looking at him and his  _ eyes _ \- Levi’s eyes were sea-blue. The Outsider’s eyes were abyss-black, and they still are. He has used the last of his power to reshape the body of the man Corvo killed for him into his own proper vessel, a new home for himself, and as Corvo looks at him he is consumed by relief and a feeling of wrongness both at once.

 

Repulsion and attraction, fear and reverence. The Outsider was both sides of that same coin as a god; now he stands before Corvo, a good half-head shorter than him and looking pathetically human, besides his black eyes.

 

“What,” he says, finding his voice again. “What will you do now? Will the Void be able to do… anything to you?”

 

“I no longer have any connection to the Void,” the Outsider says. He runs one pale hand through his wet hair, smoothing it down. “Not in this form. It can do nothing to me and I can do nothing to it, unless I choose to become a witch and start drawing on the powers of runes in a different way. An inelegant exercise,” he adds. “When next I touch the Void again, it will not be as a witch. After all, it is entirely possible I will be able to find my way back there. Someday.”

 

“I… see,” Corvo says.

 

The Outsider smiles. He grins, really, and his teeth are flat and entirely human. “I’ll adapt,” he says. “I was human once. I have watched them for centuries, for longer than this city has stood. It can’t be too difficult.”

 

Corvo stares at him. “You’d be surprised,” he says after a moment. “You’ll need something to cover your eyes with, for one. The Overseers will hang you in a minute if they see a black-eyed man wandering the streets, let alone-” He stops short, because he had been about to say Dunwall Tower, and the Outsider knows it, from the appraising look he is giving Corvo right this instant. There is a touch of unsettlingly human affection in it, too, which makes him feel - warm.

 

“Of course,” the Outsider says, smiling again. “But first, if you don’t mind, Corvo, I’d like a tour.”

 

“A… tour?”

 

“Of the city. Dunwall. I’ve seen it in the Void, past and future versions of it all, but I’ve never walked the streets with my own two feet. I would like to know where I will be living for the next while.”

 

The sky is more golden than red now, dawn breaking on what promises to be a very interesting day. “Alright,” Corvo says. “Alright. We should find you some warmer clothes first,” he suggests, because the Outsider is still shivering slightly from being, until five minutes ago, a dead body adrift in the Wrenhaven.

 

“Lead the way,” his former god says.

 

Corvo turns from the waterfront towards the street that heads south, to the blocks adjoining the Hound Pits pub where he knows there are a few stores that sell cheap leather coats and boots to workers, some made from reused whalers’ clothing. He hears the Outsider’s feet on the ground behind him, a slow patter that grows faster as he becomes more confident on his new legs, and on the crumbling brick wall that marks the beginning of the street, Corvo sees graffiti that he doubts the original artist knew would ever be so true or so appropriate as today -  _ THE OUTSIDER WALKS AMONG US _ .


End file.
